In the Land of Pain

As Julian Barnes writes in the introduction to his superb translation of Alphonse Daudet's La Doulou, the mostly forgotten writer nowadays "ate at the top literary table" during his lifetime (18401897). Henry James described him as "the happiest novelist" and "the most charming story-teller" of his day. Yet if Daudet dined in the highest company, he was also "a member of a less enviable nineteenth-century French club: that of literary syphilitics." In the Land of Painnotes toward a book never writtenis his timelessly resonant response to the disease. In quick, sharp, unflinching strokes of his pen, Daudet wrote about his symptoms ("This is me: the one-man-band of pain") and his treatments ("Mor-phine nights . . . thick black waves, sleepless on the surface of life, the void beneath"); about his fears and reflections ("Pain, you must be everything for me. Let me find in you all those foreign lands you will not let me visit. Be my philosophy, be my science"); his impressions of the patients, himself included, and their strange life at curative baths and spas ("Russians, both men and women, go into the baths naked . . . Alarm among the Southerners"); and about the "clever way in which death cuts us down, but makes it look like just a thinning-out." Given Barnes's crystalline translation, these notes comprise a recordat once shattering and lighthearted, haunting and beguilingof both the banal and the transformative experience of physical suffering, and a testament to the complex resiliency of the human spirit.Daudet, Alphonse is the author of 'In the Land of Pain' with ISBN 9780375414855 and ISBN 0375414851.