Are words actually any use to describe what pain really feels like?" French novelist Alphonse Daudet once wrote, while in a long, agonizing physical decline. "Words only come when everything is over, when things have calmed down. They refer only to memory, and are either powerless or untruthful." But the simple power and truth behind that statement make it endlessly, recursively ironic, and may help explain why Daudet bothered to continue documenting his own torturous degeneration. Physical anguish seems to have been Daudet's constant companion during the 12 years between his diagnosis as an incurable syphilitic and his death in 1897. While he intended to write an entire book on the subject of agony, the project apparently never progressed past the note-taking stage. His collection of transitory thoughts–published in 1930 as La Doulou (Pain), and newly translated by Julian Barnes and titled In The Land Of Pain–is a strange artifact of that abortive book. A short collection of terse, scattered comments on a theme, In The Land Of Pain resembles (in form, though not in content), an inspirational-snippet book in the Chicken Soup For The Soul vein. But Daudet's chicken soup is bitter and laced with morphine and chloral. "Pain is always new to the sufferer, but loses its originality for those around him," he writes. "Everyone will get used to it except me." He documents particular varieties of torment: "Intolerable pains in the heel… I spend hours, sometimes half the night, with my heel clasped in my hand." "A bizarre new pain when they're rubbing my legs dry. It's in the tendons of the neck." He compares his suffering to Christ's. He reflects on his life, and hopes his next book will be less harsh: "Poor humanity – you shouldn't tell it everything. I shouldn't inflict on people what I've endured, this painful, all too self-aware end to my life." And he takes notes on the world around him, particularly other victims recuperating at the health spas. The result is not as self-pitying or narcissistic as it may sound. Daudet was an expressive, intellectual man, and his failing health gave him a strong and intimate perspective on his subject. Meanwhile, Barnes' copious footnotes contextualize Daudet's observations; where the author mentions his contemporaries, Barnes not only provides biographies, but often locates complementary quotes from those contemporaries about Daudet himself. The whole package, while simultaneously lightweight and morbid, adds up to a concise portrait of a single man, the times and environment he lived in, the literary-to-a-fault friends and family who surrounded him, and the disease that slowly consumed him. Naturally, Chicken Soup readers should avoid In The Land Of Pain, but for the rest of the world, it's both a fascinating scrap of history and humanity, and a thoroughly apropos antidote to 14,000 Things To Be Happy About.