The Heart: A Novel

If you love profuse, overly flowery prose you'll love this book. I found it incredibly tedious and had to scan most of the book to get through it. The story really has no point. Incredibly boring. And a number of mis-translations. The one that amused me most was when she describes a person in the waiting room with "healthy teeth and shining hair and firm perinea". Not sure how she could tell the firm perinea (area in front of the anus). And described the couple "had festered on the tiles, hard eyed". Don't have any idea what the author was trying to describe here. They obviously were NOT rotting or suppurating.

This book, THE HEART, is definitely one of the best books I have ever read--and I read about 90 books a year, every year. I had never thought about the conversation that goes on about organ donation, and now I have many questions to explore now and in the future. Thank you for this remarkable book.

Don't read this translation. I read this book, but it was called "Mend the Living". Translated from the French by Jessica Moore. This kindle translation by Sam Taylor reads like most books. The translation by Jessica Moore read like great literature. Don't read this kindle book.

I normally enjoy reading stories about medical "adventures"....and was intrigued by Bill Gates' recommendation. But although I love the words and the music of language, this was a frustratingly tough read. For me, the story got lost among the long, winding, overly poetic descriptions, and I couldn't get past the first chapter. I flipped through the remaining pages to see what I was missing, but nothing got my attention.

Gorgeous translation of a beautifully written book. The story is intense, but not over-dramatized. It tells the perspectives of many different characters and moves through the events at a good pace. I read it through in one sitting (with a few breaks) on a free day. It would be perfect for a long flight read. Anyone interested in health care should like this book, but also those who simply enjoy excellent writing.

Beautifully written but the existential nature of her thinking leaves one hopeless and asking, what's the point. I believe in God, in Jesus Christ and in eternal life. While some may feel that is naïve, all you have to do is look around to see the wonder of His creation. Without faith, there is no purpose.

What a marvelous book! Exquisitely written, this book captures the heart (no pun intended) and soul of every person who plays a major part in this story.

The book begins with a boy full of life and experiencing his main joy. It's important that we see this - - the living, breathing person who will soon be the donor for other people who have been living on borrowed time. Simon isn't a faceless, nameless donor, but a flesh and blood joyful person whose time to die has come too soon.

It was fascinating to read all the steps that are taken from the very beginning of obtaining consent from the distraught and sorrowing parents - to the surgery of removing the heart - and finally to the placement of that heart in its new owner.

I would have liked to know further - how the woman with her new heart lived anew with Simon's heart. That's the mark of a good book - - when the reader doesn't want it to end.

"Bury the dead and repair the living." This line from Chekhov's PLATONOV both explains the French title of this prizewinning novel, RÉPARER LES VIVANTS, and sketches its narrative arc in a single stroke, simple and daring at the same time. For it is the story of a heart transplant, from the last hours and death of the donor to the restoration of the recipient. All taking place within a single day and night. But a very eventful day, involving many people whom we get to know and care about, and the precise working of skilled surgeons within a finely-tuned administrative apparatus. It is one of the best books I have read all year.

Kerangal is what you might call a "process writer." Immediately before this, I read and reviewed her earlier novel, NAISSANCE D'UN PONT. In it, she describes the building of a great bridge, also from start to finish, an enterprise requiring several years and thousands of engineers, workmen, and hangers-on. I described her then as the "Poet of Everything." No detail was too small for her, from the mud of the river bed to the vomit outside a Friday-night bar; no character was too insignificant. All material for her brilliant pyrotechnics, jamming epithet to epithet in jazzy verbal profusion. There is something of the same quality here, its linguistic surprise faithfully captured in the translation by Sam Taylor, but this is much more restrained, more finely focused on the task at hand. Instead of a span of years, we have an exact 24 hours, beginning at dawn on one day and ending at dawn the next. The story could have gone on for longer, but I am sure this precision was important to the author, putting her novel within the classical French unity of time. If Naissance was drunk with possibilities, The Heart is a sober work, dealing as it does with questions of death and life, and their impact on individual human beings.

But Kerangal cannot introduce a simple fact without exploring all the way around it; each new character comes with not so much a back-story as a flash vignette. When Pierre Révol, the ICU doctor first sets eyes on the blotchy face of Cordélia Owl, the nurse assigned to assist him, he immediately imagines an active night with some boyfriend. In fact, he is not far wrong, although the actuality turns out to be more bizarre and more powerful. It is important to the author, in this novel about death, to include constant reminders of life, its unruliness, its splendor, its fragility. Simon Limbres, the donor in this case, is a young surfer, killed in his prime -- but the reminder is always there that death could come for any of us, and meanwhile the only thing we can do is to live life, live it as fully as possible.

For all its detailed emphasis on medical technique, ethical issues, and legal procedure, this is a deeply human book. And the character who shines the most brightly for me is the male nurse in charge of coordinating the organ-donation process, Thomas Rémige. Once more, we get the unexpected glimpses into his private life, a youngish gay man, a lover of music. When we first see him, he is standing naked in his apartment, singing:

-- Watching this scene, it would be possible to draw an analogy with the sun salutation or the morning chants of monks and nuns, the same lyricizing of the dawn. You might imagine such a ritual to be aimed at the maintenance and conservation of the body -- like drinking a glass of cool water, brushing your teeth, unrolling a rubber mat in front of the television to do floor exercises -- but for Thomas Rémige it is something else altogether: an exploration of self -- the voice as a probe infiltrating his body and transmitting to the outside world echoes of everything that animates it. The voice as stethoscope.

Our coordinator is a singer, so what? But no, we shall see that Thomas's care and gentleness will be essential to who he is, as he listens sympathetically to the boy's separated parents as they gradually come to an acceptance of the situation and, just possibly, to a reconciliation with one another. And the music will be important too, as a symbol and something more. By this time, I was used to Maylis de Kerangal's tendency to explore every by-road that she passes, but nothing prepared me for the extraordinary flashback chapter just over halfway through the book in which Thomas visits his partner's cousin in Algiers to buy a rare goldfinch. It has nothing directly to do with the story, but at the same time it is essential, not only as a symbol of the preservation of life and the life spirit, but also as an intermezzo, a palate-cleanser at the exact moment when the focus shifts from the donor to the possible recipient.

Thomas Rémige will stay with Simon until the organs have been removed and the surgeons have repaired the necessary incisions. Remaining alone in the operating theater, he will perform his own ritual, stripping, washing, and enshrouding the body, singing to it all the time. Although not yet the end of the book, it confers a benediction whose beauty speaks absolutely to the wonder, humanity, and daring of this astounding novel:

-- When it is all gone, the body appears suddenly more naked than ever: a human body catapulted far from humanity, disturbing matter drifting through the magmatic night, through the formless space of non-meaning, an entity to which Thomas's song confers a presence, a new inscription. Because this body, fragmented and divided by life, becomes whole again under the hand that washes it, in the breath of the voice that sings; this body that has suffered something extraordinary is now united with the company of men, with common mortality. It is praised in song, made beautiful.

read and loved this book while under a misapprehension: due to my misremembering the book description, I thought I was reading a most unusual work of nonfiction, an intensely lyrical variation on one of those books that follow multiple participants in some series of events It's odd to try to recast the book as a novel after completing it. But I believe it succeeds as what it is, not only as what I thought it was.

I tried to find an equivalent of the store US' "look inside" feature for the original French text, but what seemed to be the French version showed only the title page or something similar. I wanted to verify that the original has the densely, immersively poetic style of this translation -- but I suspect it does, as the translator has translated poetry in the past and could well have been chosen on that basis.

This is a beautiful, intimate, often heartbreaking, often uplifting story of the interwoven tragedies and renewals involved in organ donation. The time may not be so very far off when we can grow replacement organs from our own cells, and this book will be reborn as historical fiction; but tt will lose no value in that transition.

The thing is, there are these strings of characters, words, sentences if you wish, or even paragraphs, that radiate like the soft, sensuous auroras of the north, the far, far north usually, but sometimes streaming down as far as Kansas, when in the twilight or later the shimmering curtains of light, or perhaps green waves as from the ocean but articulated into the vertical, these magical ocular vistas that are generated after excitation by solar protons spiraling along magnetic field lines, those invisible lines born deep in the core of our richly blue and green planet -- these vistas overwhelm the senses with a vision as if from afar, even beyond the earthly phenomena to which we are accustomed, but nevertheless, we can bathe in its light, but the thing is, like those Henry James'-esque sentences, we can only perceive them through the mysterious processes of which we are conscious but in a fundamental way uncomprehending, the neural electrical storms beating with invisible sparks and pulses that after long neural journeys arrive in a morphologically well-understood area of our cerebral cortex but once there, the thing is, well -- we really have little understanding of what happens next, but be that as it may, we do have the emotional satisfaction of having read to the very end the first sentence (and the first paragraph, and perhaps even the first mini-chapter) of this book.

Book had descriptions that were way too long and detailed. If you like that kind of writing, then this is your book.
Author went off on extended detours to try to do character development but I found myself skipping over most of
it to try to get to the point. Book could have been cut in half-at least.

By page 7, I realized that my previous reading experience was lacking. I have always enjoyed reading because it was a skill that came easily to me, almost like breathing. I never had to really focus on the words on the page. The Heart forced me to examine the text. It forced me to leave my comfort zone and develop my expertise. I was confronted with words that had previously held no meaning. Words like, “grandiloque” forced me to stop reading and try to understand the sentence to find the possible meaning. (I ended up looking up this particular word).

This isn’t a story where the events of the main character affects the secondary characters around him; in fact it’s the most true to life novel I have ever experienced. Simon Limbres death is just a moment in the surrounding characters lives. Some are more affected than others. Many times if Simon was the main character. In many chapters, Simon was barley a character at all, he was more like a tiny instance in the characters life- but they were more focused on something else that is happening had happened to them. Keerangal truly captured the real human experience.

There are some sentences in French as well as Latin that are un-translated and un-explained.

The author writes in an extremely descriptive style, which allows the reader to appreciate the gravity of each scene.

I would recommend this book to a high level reader or a reader who is looking to improve their skills. This book has a clear plot and does end suddenly, which was slightly upsetting.

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Terrific start - really brings the reader into the struggle. The story is simple - 19 year old, active young man goes surfing with friends and on the way home, there is an accident. I don't think this is much of a spoiler but in case - WARNING - injuries are fatal and he is brain dead. Then the story begins with the reading getting into the head and hearts of the parents, surgeon, nurse, girlfriend. As a reader in favor of organ donation in theory, I knew what the 'right' response from the parents should have been but as a parent of 3 teenagers, I also could imagine the parent's struggle. Really well written. It tapped into reality, pain and angst. The only reason for 4 stars as opposed to 5 was that the last 25% lost steam and emotion. Once the parents and their challenge were out, the rest was just more words.

The cover summary for this book got my attention however, I knew I was not in for a 'treat' reading this from the very first page. The author's penchant for squeezing as many words into one sentence, which in fact was one whole first page, turned me off at once. I tried skimming thru to get some better semblance of the book but eventually gave up.

An interesting book, but the LONG, convoluted sentences (at least one ran to 26 lines) made it hard to follow. And after a while I couldn't remember what the subject was. So the writing style turned me off a bit. It would be a good book for book club discussion or if you are ever involved with organ transplantation. Otherwise for me it was....meh

An enlightening read which made me evaluate what I would want in this situation of if I had to make this decision for someone else who had not specified what their wishes would be. Set in a 24 hour time frame, there was a real sense of tension, beginning with the specialist nurse who had to initiate the donation process by proposing the idea of organ donation to the very shocked parents who then had to make a decision in a critical time frame.

i found the book fascinating and have gone through it twice......the hospital procedures were very informative
but i felt i wasn't able to visualize the family.....their story is incomplete....better to delve into their feelings and
thoughts sand decision making processes rather than the external environment.

This book was not what I expected. Sometimes that is good and sometimes not so much.

The Heart is really written like a report - the story is told completely by a narrator. There are no quotation marks around what people said (which is something I find off-putting). There seemed to be a clinical detachment in the story that I found off-putting, especially when it was such an emotional premise.

It was interesting to learn the exact steps in what happens when a person is declared brain dead and organ transplantation is a possibility. I just felt it could have been told with more feeling.

Actually, because of the detachment in tone, I wondered if the story was really non-fiction. It just to me felt sort of flat at the end and sort of disappointing.

DONT WASTE YOUR TIME

This was an exceptionally irritating novel. The story is okay but not remarkable. The problem is that her writing gets in the way.

The story is relatively interesting and straighforward: a young man dies and his heart is transplanted. But this story might take only 20 pages to tell, so the author fills it with boring side stories of people unessential to the story. Since some of these side stories have a sexual flavor, I assume she added them to spice up the book. The metaphors - she is making an attempt at fine writing as one finds with Cusk - are a distraction and even ridiculous. A mother calls her ex husband to tell him that their son has been critically wounded. The author actually describes the signal traveling through wires, into a basement, etc.

I skipped whole chapters and got more and more annoyed and angry. It is just due to a defect in my own character (that I should finish what I start) that I finished it al all.