I was transfixed by this book. At first, I didn't want to read it. A three hundred word opening sentence? Really? But I was immediately seduced, and continued to be seduced by the atmosphere - the atmospheres - that de Karangal creates as she introduces us to Simon, the boy who loves to surf, but who dies in a road accident as he and his friends return from an early morning assignment with the waves.

He's brain-dead. His perfect body is there for his mother, his father to see, lying on his hospital bed. Thanks to technology, he breathes, as if in dreamless sleep. But he's dead. And his parents need to decide whether his organs can be 'harvested' so others might live.

'How could they even envision it, Simon’s death, when his complexion still flushes pink, and supple, when his nape still bathes in cool blue watercress and he is stretched out with his feet in the gladiolus.'

Now, they must decide now, watching their son calmly 'sleeping'. This is their story. It's the story of the hospital staff, medical and otherwise, charged with his care, coming into work from their messy day-to-day lives. They leave behind them evenings of unsatisfactory sex, of football matches missed, and it's business as usual for them. It's the story of Simon's girlfriend, cross that he's preferred to go surfing than snatch a few more hours with her. It's the story of the woman destined to receive his heart.

The life and death of Simon's heart impacts on so many others, and de Karangal explores this in affecting, poetic language. The emotional consequences overlie the whole book, but she's also researched, quite meticulously, the whole process of transplant from the moment that a patient is recognised as a possible donor, to the time when the heart is successfully transferred to the body of someone else. So many, many people are involved. And it all has to happen so quickly.

This is no medical manual. It's poetic, beautiful, lyrical, rhythmical - and audacious: a quality which seemed to identify the book for me as 'very French'. And I want to single out the quality of the translation. I haven't read the original, but I have read the translator's notes. Moore seems to have successfully been 'sensing in two languages, with the English sentences lain like a transparency over the original'. She has rendered into wonderfully expressive English a work with many of the qualities of French cinema: a narrative alongside an intimate exploration of what it is to be human. ( )

Keep on Searching

Media:Audio
Read by Steven Jay Cohen
Length: 8 hrs and 49 mins

I bought this book after reading Eastbound. I’d been so overwhelmed by that novella that I needed more of de Kerangal than the two hours that Eastbound had given me.

Unfortunately I could not finish The Heart. The six hours about the day in the life of a heart transplant was beyond me. Yes the writing is mesmerizing and the detail finessed. Yet somehow it wasn’t enough. But it wasn’t so bad that it doesn’t deserve a mention, and I’m sure others will like it more than I could.

A young boy, a surfer dies in a car accident. His young healthy heart is made available for a transplant. Everyone involved is a subject of de Kerangal’s attention. The surgeons, the hospital and care workers, the relatives of the donor and the donee all play a part in this perfectly chronicled choreographed feat of modern medicine. Every detail of the participants’ lives in the twenty for hours is described, accurately and efficiently. From the cup of coffee the head nurse drinks, from the assistant hospital orderly’s intake of her cigarette, to the donor’s mother’s inner feelings come to the reader as if we are in the room with the participants.

Despite my enthusiasm at finding a new writer to follow, I had a problem with The Heart. The poetic language seemed at odds with the subject matter. The symbolism and softness of the beating heart didn’t sit well in the stark sterility of the operating theater. Feeling and technology didn’t mix. For me at least.

I suppose I was expecting something along the lines of Eastbound - short and softly emotional. The Heart is a novel three times longer than the novella. What worked on a train trip didn’t work for me in a hospital setting.

Still I look forward to reading more of this writer’s work. It is just that Eastbound set such a high bar, and maybe my heart wasn’t in this one. ( )

2.5 stars ( )

We've all see dramatic organ transplants in movies or on TV. The way this book differs from those depictions is the way in which it demonstrates just how many people are involved in these life saving procedures. Of course, the doctors and nurses are out in front and are seen as heroes, but so many people work silently and diligently in the background. And the physical and emotional struggles they go through are fully recognized in this wonderful life affirming
novel ! ( )

https://tamaranth.blogspot.com/2021/07/2021090-mend-living-maylis-de-kerangal.ht... ( )