Mylis de Kerangal - The Heart

Rating: 2/5

Review:
Not for me

The Heart was originally issued under the title Mend The Living.  It is a brilliant idea for a novel and the author shows real insight and intelligence in dealing with a complex, highly emotional subject but in the end I found that the excessive "style" completely drowned out the quality of the insight. Ludicrously long sentences and the persistent and sometimes simply incorrect use of obscure vocabulary meant that I was forever aware of how show-offy the writing was, which too often prevented me getting involved with what the writing was about.

Maylis de Kerangal examines the death of a young man and the subsequent transplantation of his heart by telling the story over a 24-hour period of the various people involved. She is very keen to give us rounded portraits of real characters, which is commendable and which she does by giving us some of the minutiae of their everyday lives. However, it's terribly overdone; for example, as the story of the death and subsequent transplant begins she introduces us to a nurse thus:
"…if he had looked more closely he would have seen that there was something a little odd about her, eyes clear but marks on her neck, swollen lips, knots in her hair, bruises on her knees, he might wonder where this floating smile came from, the Mona Lisa smile that doesn't leave even when she leans over patients to clean their eyes and mouths, inserts breathing tubes, checks vital signs, administers treatments, and maybe if he did he would be able to guess that she had seen her lover again last night, that he had phoned her after weeks of silence, the dog, and that she showed up on an empty stomach, beauteous, decorated like a reliquary, lids smoky, hair shining, breasts warm…"
And so on and so on. There's no trace of a full stop for another entire page and to me it all seemed excessive and, just as they're preparing to treat a critically injured young man, very out of place. That gargantuan sentence also eventually ends up telling us that as a result of all this she is "someone he would be able to rely on," which seems a very questionable and peculiarly French idea of a guarantee of reliability to me. (Mind you, de Kerangal does give this nurse the sublime name of Cordelia Owl, for which I can forgive her a great deal.) Lots of characters get this sort of treatment, and it really does get a bit much.

As another example, the moment when the doctor breaks the news to the mother of her son's death could have been excellent and full of genuine human insight and compassion, but again was spoiled by overblown language and nonsense like the mother wishing for an "acidulous happy ending," and a little later going past a waiting room containing magazines with "mature women smiling from the covers, with healthy teeth, shining hair, toned perineums..." I was so startled that had to check that perineum meant what I thought it meant - which seems to be more than the author or translator did. It does, and frankly, that really isn't the sort of magazine cover I'd expect to find in a hospital waiting room. Somewhere under all this I suspect that there is an evocative and compassionate portrait of a mind struggling with the shock of sudden grief, but I only got an occasional fleeting glimpse of it among all the I'm-so-clever writing.

I also found the style intruding in plenty of other places, like the surgeon who loves the pattern of his shifts because of (among a long, florid list of other things) "…their alveolar intensity, their specific temporality…" Er…what? And "alveolar"? Come on! Neither the phonetic nor the anatomical meaning makes any sense here, and this is far from the only example of adjectives and adverbs thrown in for no discernible reason which are recondite, arcane and abstruse. (See? We can all do it, you know.) Early on, two doctors speak to each other in medical shorthand which de Kerang describes as a language which (among a long, florid list of other things) "banishes the verbose as a waste of time." It's a phrase of which I was forcibly reminded more than once while reading this book, I can tell you.

At one point, a doctor enters and walks across the lobby of the hospital, which is described like this: "…Thomas knows this lobby with its oceanic dimensions by heart, this emptiness that he must cleave in one shot, drawing a diagonal across the space to reach the stairway…" He's just arriving at the front door and walking to the stairs, for heaven's sake! With absolutely everything presented with this pitch of ridiculously over-written intensity, the scenes and episodes which should have been really affecting lost almost all their power.

I'm sorry to go on so much (although this review is probably still shorter than some of de Kerangal's sentences) and to sound so critical, but this should have been a really fine novel, and for me it was destroyed by self-conscious literary tricksiness. (And if I'd read the Translator's Note first, I might well not have bothered at all.) I think this is a terrible shame; I was very disappointed and in some places made very cross by this book. I can't recommend it.