Locked In

While watching The Diving Bell and the Butterfly it came home to me more clearly than ever that literature strains to do what cinema achieves easily: capture the sheer, palpable physicality of the world. Literature’s real victories are won precisely where film huffs and puffs: the inner world of thought.

Jean-Dominique Bauby’s memoir is one of the most soul-stirring books ever written. A stroke left the forty-three-year-old editor...

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