He likes his shifts, Sundays and nights ... He likes their alveolar intensity, their specific temporality, fatigue like a surreptitious stimulant that gradually rises through the body, accelerates and makes it sharper... likes their vibratile silence, their half-light – devices that blink in the dimness, blue computer screens or desk lamps like the flame of a candle in a La Tour painting – The Newborn, for example – and again this physicality of the work, this climate of an enclave, this watertightness, the department like a spaceship launched into a black hole, a submarine plunging into a bottomless chasm, The Mariana Trench. [loc. 234]
I wishlisted this book in 2016 following a fascinating review in the Guardian; five years later, I decided to purchase and read as part of my non-fiction diet; only very gradually did I realise that Mend the Living is actually a novel. In my defense, my limited experience of translated French nonfiction has been strikingly poetic: "Atoms in stars speak to atoms in eyes using the language of light" ... and Mend the Living won the Wellcome Book Prize, which I thought was for non-fiction ... and though some covers say 'novel', mine didn't ...
It's the story of a young man's heart. Simon Limbeau goes surfing with his friends one winter's morning: on the way home their van crashes, and Simon arrives at the hospital in a coma. His brain has ceased to function, but his heart still beats. His appalled parents are told that they have to decide whether his heart can be donated for transplant: they must decide quickly, for there's a narrow window of time during which the process can be carried out.
This is a beautifully-written book, with language that is joyous and intense and often very technical. (I found translator Jessica Moore's Afterword intriguing and thought-provoking, a fascinating personal account of the challenges involved in translating "the streaming realm of long sentences and what Maylis has called a “language hold-up” (braquage du langage) – an inventive use of rare words and concrete vocabularies." [loc 2844]). The narrative touches on the lives of many affected by Simon's situation: his divorced parents, the nurse who tends his still-breathing body, the head of organ donations, medical technicians, the transplant surgeon, the intended recipient of the heart. There are precise descriptions of medical matters (I did not know that transplanted hearts are sometimes stitched onto the original heart) and achingly credible accounts of interior emotional landscapes. I found myself rereading some of de Kerangal's intricate paragraphs, for instance the metaphor of a massive landslide for the irrevocable change, the before-and-after, experienced by Simon's mother Marianne.
This is a beautiful and strangely uplifting novel, the story of twenty-four hours in a mosaic of the individual lives affected by Simon's death. It makes the ordinary extraordinary, almost mythic, and celebrates the intricate connections of those who give Simon's heart a second life.
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