Maylis de Kerangal

Maylis de Karangal's extraordinary 'Mend the Living' may well have been my book-of-the-year of 2017. I was eager to read this too. Here is a book that shows the same virtuosic and original command of language, the same lack of dependence on what might traditionally be seen as a plot. It swept me away with its initial narrative , bringing together the visionaries, the professionals, the technicians, the foot soldiers, the hangers on, the chancers who see an opportunity in the development on a quite enormous suspension bridge in Coca, Southern California. Some feature often in the narrative. Others less so.

My initial enthusiasm slightly waned: maybe constructing suspension bridges isn't quite my thing. But as a tour de force, giving real insight into the workings of such a project (though that certainly isn't the point: this is no construction manual), as well as tantalising glimpses of often essentially nomadic lives, it's as wonderfully constructed as 'Mend the Living'. All the same, the dramatic interest to be had from the birth of the bridge, or the death of a young man can't quite be compared. 'Mend the Living' won by a country mile.… (mehr)

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.… (mehr)

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.… (mehr)

Ain’t got no cigarettes…

Media: Audio
Read by Jennifer Pickens
Length: 2 hrs and 23 mins

The central character in this brilliant novella is the train. In what appears to be a never-ending journey, it doggedly winds its way east from Moscow to Vladivostok. Aliocha and Helene are two of the passengers on the ride that takes place in post Soviet Russia.

Aliocha a young Russian conscript and Helene is a slightly older French woman. They are strangers when they meet on the train when Aliocha is trying to desert. Helene becomes his accomplice. The tension is high for both and for the reader, as the train moves east and the probability of Aliocha being able to stay hidden until he can make a break from it, increases.

The pair have no common language and are reluctantly entwined, together in a fragile shell. The Siberian landscape is their moving background.

It’s a gripping tale that covers a very short time period, a few days. A lot happens and like Aliocha the reader loses all sense of time. Seven days becomes an hour, a minute, but at the same time the trip appears to be unending.

What sets this book apart from other books I’ve read in the past two years is the beauty of its prose. The reader is put firmly into the train with Aliocha and Helene and the Provodnitsy. The imagery that bounces from train windows as in a shattered film sequence is depicted in unfaltering detail. I was amazed at the skill that was evident in Jessica Moore’s translation. There were times that I couldn’t help but try to translate back into French to experience how the sentences would sound in their original language.

Helene and Aliocha sleep, eat, and smoke cigarettes. As an ex-smoker I related to de Kerangal’s detailed description of the cigarettes. From the cheap cardboard filters to the packaging and the associated cravings. I noticed that cigarettes played a large part in Kerangal’s other novel The Heart. She’s must be a smoker. The pleasure of smoking oozed back into my memory as I tried to slow my reading, not wanting the train to reach the final stop and the book to end.

Highly recommended.… (mehr)