In the Land of Pain

“Pain, you must be everything for me. Let me find in you all those foreign lands you will not let me visit.” –Alphonse Daudet

In the Land of Pain–Alphonse Daudet’s poignant, humorous, and piercing reflections on his years of enduring severe illness–is a classic in the literary annals of human suffering.

Daudet (1840-1897) was a greatly admired writer during his lifetime, praised by Dickens and Henry James. In the prime of his life, he developed an agonizing nerve disease caused by syphilis and began taking notes about his experience, published posthumously as In the Land of Pain. Daudet wrote in powerful, unflinching images about his excruciating symptoms, his fears, his desperate attempts at treatment, and the effects of the morphine he came to depend on. His novelist’s eye and sense of humor did not desert him as he observed the bizarre society of his fellow patients at curative spas, nor did his generosity and compassion for them and for his friends and family. In Julian Barnes’s crystalline translation, Daudet’s notes comprise a record–at once shattering, haunting, and beguiling–of both the banal and the transformative realities of physical suffering.