In January 1996, French magazine editor Jean-Dominique Bauby suffered a rare kind of stroke, locked-in syndrome, in which mental faculties are left intact but the victim is paralyzed. Bauby wrote a memoir about his tragedy, communicating with a collaborator by blinking (one blink for yes, two for no, as well as a whole method of communicating the alphabet). The book, published March 7 by French publisher Robert Laffont/Fixot, became a 200,000-plus-copy bestseller. Bauby, however, died two days after publication.
Now Bauby's story has traveled across the Atlantic, thanks to Knopf president and publisher Sonny Mehta's acquisition last week of the English translation (entitled The Diving Bell and the Butterfly). The short (28 chapters, 100-plus pages) memoir will be published here with a 75,000 first printing on May 23.
