The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

. I am one of the co-founders of a book club here in Vegas. We read books that are being adapted into movies and then we all go see the movie (instead of gathering and talking about the book). Afterwards, we go to a restaurant and get appetizers and drinks and chat, about the movie and anything else. It's great and there is definitely a core group of 5 or 6 people who always participate with a few others that are in and out. We've done several over the past 2 years, including The Black Dahlia, Running with Scissors, Edie: American Girl/Factory Girl, Zodiac, A Mighty Heart, Nanny Diaries, Into the Wild, The Kite Runner and The Other Boleyn Girl.

We intended to do The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, but it is a smaller, foreign film of the type that don't often make it to Vegas so we ended up skipping it. I bought the book for myself anyway, because it is truly an amazing story: the 43 year old editor of French Elle magazine, Jean-Dominique Bauby, suffers a massive "cerebrovascular event" (aka a stroke) and wakes up completely paralyzed except for his left eye. He suffers from "locked-in syndrome" defined on Wikipedia as "a condition in which a patient is aware and awake, but cannot move or communicate due to complete paralysis of nearly all voluntary muscles in the body. It is the result of a brain stem lesion in which the ventral part of the pons is damaged. The condition has been described as "the closest thing to being buried alive". In French, the common term is "maladie de l'emmuré vivant", literally translated as walled-in alive disease." His speech therapist devises a method for him to communicate by blinking his eye by creating an alphabet that is in order from most commonly used letter in the French alphabet to the least commonly used letter:

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The speech therapist begins reciting the letters in this new alphabet and when she gets to the letter that he wants, he blinks. Then she starts from the beginning again until she reaches the second letter and he blinks again and so on and so forth. A ridiculously tedious process, but literally the only way for Jean-Do to communicate his thoughts. Before the stroke, he was thinking about writing a modern version of The Count of Monte Cristo, and decides instead to do a book that is part-memoir, part-fantasy (his imagination is perfectly intact, after all). The publisher sends someone out to do his "dictation" and what emerges is a beautiful and tragic portrait of a man whose body has failed him, but whose mind, memory and imagination live on. The memoir helps to sustain him, gives him a reason for being but is an utterly exhausting process and sadly he dies 10 days after its publication.

I love foreign films and haven't seen one in the theatre in years (the last was Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon in late 2000) and I was thrilled that the movie did come to Vegas after all (due to being nominated for a couple Academy Awards, I'm sure) though only in one theatre for a couple weeks. My friend Katie noticed that it was playing and remembered me mentioning it as a book club possibility and so she and I went and saw it after work on the last day it was in town. The cinematography was amazing, a lot of the movie is shot from Jean-Do's one-eyed perspective which results in a bit of an IMAX effect with the camera swooping around in a blurry manner. It was a beautiful film, well-acted and well-directed and I highly recommend both seeing it and reading the book on which it is based. As a general rule, I don't like to see movies before I read the books (so I missed out on Atonement, another book club choice that got overlooked due to the holidays), but considering the amazing reviews and awards The Diving Bell and the Butterfly received, I just couldn't miss it.

Below is an picture of the real Jean-Dominique Bauby sitting on a balcony overlooking the English Channel in the hospital in Berck Sur Mer in northern France. I wonder what he was thinking when this photo was taken?