In the Land of Pain
  • Published: 2 April 2018
  • ISBN: 9781784873455
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 112
  • RRP: $27.99

In the Land of Pain

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Daudet's fascinating notebook, revived and translated by Julian Barnes.

Alphonse Daudet was a highly popular nineteenth-century French novelist, whose work radiated humour and good cheer. Few knew that for his entire adult life he suffered from syphilis, a disease both unmentionable and incurable at the time. What even fewer realised was that he kept an intimate notebook in which he recorded the development and terrifying effects of the disease. Describing a life in pain, and the sometimes alarming treatments he underwent, Daudet's journal is unique for its comic zest, lucid self-examination and stoicism.

Translated by the Booker Prize-winning writer Julian Barnes.
  • Published: 2 April 2018
  • ISBN: 9781784873455
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 112
  • RRP: $27.99
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About the author

Alphonse Daudet

Alphonse Daudet was born in Nimes in 1840. He made his name with gentle stories and novels portraying life in the French provinces, notably Lettres de mon Moulin (1869). He died in 1897. His extraordinary notebooks detailing the effects of syphilis on his life were first published under the title In the Land of Pain by Daudet's widow in 1931. The first English translation by Julian Barnes was published by Cape in 2002.

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Praise for In the Land of Pain

Barnes...has given Daudet a startling resurrection

New York Times

A new translation of a forgotten pocket masterpiece by a forgotten pocket French writer, a very short, moving, book about pain

Observer

Vivid and impressionistic, it reads at times like a list of symptoms, at times like a sort of macabre prose poem… It looks like a slight book, but Daudet's eloquence is dynamite

Evening Standard

A great deal of this unique text needs explaining to modern readers. The footnotes that Barnes provides are wonders of information and observation, brilliant novellas in themselves

Sunday Times

This slim volume is full of snapshots from the frontier of pain: unsentimental observations, anecdotes and cries of anguish

Sunday Herald

A deeply moving, if harrowing, text now being used by Susan Sontag in New York to train doctors to listen to patients

The Times