The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly: A Memoir of Life in Death

By: Jean-Dominique Bauby / Narrated By: René Auberjonois

Length: 2 hrs and 9 mins

A truly cinematic audiobook, a treat for the senses—

Which is odd, as this is Jean-Dominique Bauby’s memoir of his time as a victim of locked-in syndrome after suffering a devastating stroke. His body, except for an ability to sliiiightly move his neck, is completely immobile. It’s useless, practically dead. It’s the diving bell that weighs his every moment down. But his mind is as keen and sharp as before the day of the stroke. It travels far and wide as he lays in his hospital bed; it sifts through memories, finding and enjoying things as mundane as chewing on sausage, relishing the texture of it, the flavors that are now off limits to him. It is, he says, the butterfly.

If you saw the movie, you know how it was greeted with great critical acclaim and was deemed to be visually breathtaking. It was! It was colorful, it was lively and energetic. And that’s exactly how this audiobook is.

First, Auberjonois is a truly stellar narrator and seems to have been made for the part of Jean-Dominique; he speaks with great passion about his memories, about his mental journeys, about his inability to be a part of the lives, truly, of his two young children. He even speaks with great passion about his boredom, how the hospital aides sometimes turn the tv to a station or show that is grating on the ears, dull to other senses.

The entire book was written by Bauby blinking his left eyelid on the letter he chose to a transcriber who recited a “French language frequency-ordered alphabet” and it reportedly (Thanks, Wikipedia!) took about 200,000 blinks to write the book, an average of two minutes for an average word. Though he does indeed work with a speech therapist, and is able to garble out a song about a kangaroo by the end of the book, his main mode of communicating with the world is through this process. His left eye is his window to the world, and he uses it to convey to all who listen that he is NOT a vegetable.

I can’t even begin to fathom what all it took to get this book written. It’s poetic, it’s stunning, and his way with words is unique and truly remarkable. His insights and experiences are sometimes sweet in a sad way, sometimes devastating. As on his Lucky Day, where he sits in his own urine, a monitor beeping over and over, sweat ungluing the tape on his right eye causing the lashes to tickle his eye. When a nurse finally does come in, a commercial on tv asks if he’s lucky. Who notices that? Who makes the connection? Bauby does. In a devastating way.

As the diving bell is his life, the butterfly is his salvation. Bauby remembers a liar of a boy he knew when he was young. The boy’s stories grew from telling to telling, becoming more fantastical each time, and Bauby realizes that he himself is now that boy. He’s a soldier, a cyclist, a race car driver. He travels all over the world, to Paris and the offices of the magazine where he was once the editor-in-chief, where now he has no place to them. He is sad, he is an empty void. But then he travels to Hong Kong, and that is difficult because he never went there before the stroke. Always wanted to, something always came up. So it’s a bit trickier to navigate the streets of Hong Kong in his mind, and it’s other places that bring sounds and smells and tastes.

The book builds up to the last day of his normal existence, the day the stroke hit, and it’s sad. Then, as Bauby finishes the book and he and Claude, the woman who’s been assisting him, go over the pages they’ve written together over two months, it’s even sadder. He closes the book with some whimsy, much contemplation. And to know that he died of pneumonia just two days after the publication of the book is devastating.

Truly, this is an awesome book, great writing, fantastic narration. And by the way? When I was looking it up, I found maaaany places that say NOT to believe what the movie version says about the women in Bauby’s life. It wasn’t his wife who stayed with him each day, or his girlfriend who couldn’t handle it. Rather, it was his girlfriend, Florence, who was with him day to day. She just got a bum rap.

But obviously, though he only had four decades and a few years on the planet, he was a creative and energetic man. And that he could go through locked-in syndrome, and come out with a truly impressive compilation of thoughts, imagery, memories is astounding.

Such courage. Even through the pain of his existence, we see, and Auberjonois voices, the diving bell, the butterfly, the man behind it all.

audible