Description:
Severe illness (and its consequence) are as treacherous to write about as they are to experience, especially when the illness or "death" is one's own. The breach of self-pity gapes, and florid language sweeps down to exalt banal and homely details. Few books escape this to become works of art and wisdom. Jean-Dominique Bauby's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly comes to mind, as it will for those who pick up Philippe Labro's Dark Tunnel White Light, hoping for a similar effect. Labro's account of his near-death experience does not escape grandiosity. Broken into short chapters (some only two to three pages long), he circles his theme, tossing in enough facts to keep the reader oriented (an undiagnosed but increasingly severe illness; the edema blocking the opening of his larynx that landed him in hospital; the ensuing comatose state). Strangely, he keeps seeing visitors in what appears to be a dream, but no! They're his loved ones. The things is, they're dead, and they beckon to him. Definitely a crafted narrative (Labro is a journalist and filmmaker as well as a successful novelist), this defines, ironically, its shortcomings. The narrative is most effective when it functions an an unembellished report on a harrowing and mysterious experience. Descriptions of such phenomena as the two powerful and contradictory voices--that which fights for life and that which urges dying--grip us, as do the recurring visits from "the dead of my life" (although an unintended comic pause seizes the reader when realizing that many, if not most, of Labro's friends were suicides or died violent deaths. With friends like that ... ). Drifting on currents, shallow and deep, of memory fragments, metaphysics, the pull between living and dying, the reader must paddle through puffery to the worthy shore.
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