Maylis de Kerangal - literary saga of a dozen men and women – engineers, designers, machinery operators, cable riggers – all employees of the international consortium charged with building a bridge somewhere in a mythical and fantastic California

 

Maylis de Kerangal, Birth of a Bridge. Trans. by Jessica Moore, Talonbooks, 2014.

From one of the most exciting novelists writing in France today comes this literary saga of a dozen men and women – engineers, designers, machinery operators, cable riggers – all employees of the international consortium charged with building a bridge somewhere in a mythical and fantastic California.
Told on a sweeping scale reminiscent of classic American adventure films, this Médicis Prize–winning novel chronicles the lives of these workers, who represent a microcosm of not just mythic California, but of humanity as a whole. Their collective effort to complete the megaproject recounts one of the oldest of human dramas, to domesticate – and to radically transform – our world through built form, with all the dramatic tension it brings: a threatened strike, an environmental dispute, sabotage, accidents, career moves, and love affairs … Here generations and social classes cease to exist, and everyone and everything converges toward the bridge as metaphor, a cross-cultural impression of America today.
Kerangal’s writing has been widely praised for its scope, originality, and use of language. The style of her prose is rich and innovative, playing with different registers (from the most highly literary to the most colloquial slang), taking risks and inventing words, and playing with speed and tension through grammatical ellipsis and elision. She employs a huge vocabulary and, most strikingly, brings together words not often combined to evoke startling comparisons. Not since Vikram Seth’s Golden Gate has such a great Californian novel been told.
 
“Ms. de Kerangal’s writing is always exuberant (and boisterously translated by Jessica Moore) … This delightful book’s unabashed idealism, combined with those playfully literary proper names, marks it as a kind of aspirational fairy tale. … Ms. de Kerangal gives us a Tocquevillian picture of America from its most flattering angle: An enterprising, melting-pot democracy driven by dreams of progress and happy to get its hands dirty…” – Wall Street Journal

“First, there is Maylis de Kerangal’s prose – a fast-flowing, meandering river of awesome depth, scintillating with flashes of brilliance, gripping and treacherous as roiling underwater currents. Hovering over it is the story itself, a grandiose, gravity-defying feat of narrative structure, acting as a bridge between reality and myth, development and nature, megalomania and intimacy, and attracting the most varied set of characters ever assembled – nomads of the modern world sharing this surreal space suspended between two shores, living outside the boundaries of ordinary life. A delicate balance to maintain, assuredly, but which the novel manages to perfection.” – Martine Desjardins

“Maylis de Kerangal has a flair for describing the landscapes that are at the heart of her novel – landscapes of tremendous beauty, for the reader who wishes to travel through the act of reading.” – La Presse 
 

Originally published in French in 2010, this novel follows the conception and building of a bridge in the timeless, almost mythical Coca, California.
It’s fitting that the epigraph comes from Jorge Luis Borges, for the world de Kerangal creates has a surreal Borges-ean feel to it. The central character is the bridge itself, though it’s surrounded by humans of various shapes and statures. The project manager is Georges Diderot, outsized in body and in reputation, who has the almost unimaginably complex job of coordinating the job with the personalities of the workers. Central among these is Summer Diamantis, aka “Miss Concrete,” who’s in charge of this central aspect of the civil engineering. She’s used to being a pioneer in her field and has ventured into the solid world of shaping concrete in part to escape her past. We also meet Sanche Alphonse Cameron, the chief crane operator, whose base of operations is a 6-foot-square box 150 feet above the ground. (Although this is a tight space, before the novel ends, he succeeds in having a sexual tryst there.) John Johnson, also known as The Boa, is Coca’s ambitious mayor, who has decided that the old Golden Bridge will just no longer suffice, for he needs to make a name for himself. De Kerangal delights in naming her characters playfully and philosophically, so we also meet worker Kate Thoreau, architect Ralph Waldo and minor character Verlaine. Despite obstacles like a fatal accident and the threat of a work stoppage, the bridge does eventually get built.

The whole narrative unfolds in a dreamlike manner, and Moore’s translation is elegant and sensitively attuned to the author’s wordplay and neologisms.  - Kirkus Reviews 
 

French novelist de Kerangal creates a modern saga chronicling the construction of a colossal bridge. The original edition won both the 2010 Prix Médicis and the 2010 Prix Franz Hessel. Beginning with an international consortium winning the tender and hundreds of people—project managers, engineers, crane operators, truck drivers—converging on a small town in California, the novel weaves their individual stories into one grand narrative. While the bridge undoubtedly will bring prosperity to the town, the native groups and the as-yet unspoiled land on the far side of the river will be forever compromised. Opposition groups form, progress is threatened. And progress itself is an ambiguous element in the novel, often taking the form of political corruption. But there is also lyricism and beauty to be found through each character's obsessive outlook on the land and the bridge. Moore (winner of the PEN America Translation Award) stays true to de Kerangal's unique prose, which flows from the mythic to the mundane. Her translation is clear and unadorned. The story told through its varied cast of characters, alternating from the grandiose to the intimate, is one that will stay with readers long after the book is closed and the bridge is built.- Publishers Weekly

Birth of a Bridge is a novel about a present-day construction project, the building of a grand bridge by a multinational consortium on America's West Coast, in the fictional city of Coca. It's a big project -- projected to cost three billion dollars, where "thirty million cubic yards of concrete will be poured before the cables are placed": 
The architect announces measurements comparable to those of the longest suspension bridges in the world. Length: 6,200 feet; centre suspension span: 4,100 feet; width: 100 feet; height of the deck above the water: 230 feet; height of the towers: 750 feet. A delusion of grandeur, like an enormous desire contained within a very small body.
       (A 4,100 suspension span makes it comparable to the Golden Gate or Verrazano–Narrows bridges.)
       In some ways, Birth of a Bridge harks back to the American and Soviet industrial novels of nearly a century ago which glorified the triumph of industry and engineering, reveling in great feats of construction that required both brilliant scientific minds and a vast nameless army of industrious workers (as well as -- though there was always less emphasis on this -- a great deal of capital). De Kerangal's is a modern variation on this kind of novel, and she manages to create both an effective timeless/universal feel -- much of it through her language, that echoes some of these older novels but to which she adds her own sparkling toch -- as well as situating it it very well in current times.
       In her description of some of the other construction projects some of her characters have been involved in, as well as the tender process, down to the small announcement in The New York Times, this is a novel of our age. The firms behind the project are international -- Pontoverde is a consortium of a French, an American, and an Indian company -- and many of those employed on the project come from far far away -- as far away as China.
       De Kerangal focuses on a cross-section of those playing a part in the construction of the bridge, offering some background on a handful of characters, and then returning to them repeatedly over the course of the narrative, including itinerant Georges Diderot, the man in charge on site; the diminutive crane-operator Sanche Alphonse Cameron, spending his days towering over the site in his small crane-cabin; Mo Yun, driven to seek out opportunity far from his birthplace; Katherine Thoreau, seeing opportunity, even as she is weighed down by the family she has to support. There is overlap in their stories on (and off) the construction site -- notably between Diderot and Katherine -- but these and the other personal stories are only part of the large mosaic de Kerangal presents. Others figure prominently briefly too, from the environmentalists who briefly manage to bring construction to a halt to daredevil workers who get themselves fired. Personal assault and even a plan for large-scale sabotage also occur, and there are several dead bodies along the way.
       It is the larger vision which dominates, the sense of all the changes the idea of the bridge and then its construction bring, at every level from the personal to the global. As in a construction project, pieces are slotted in in a particular order -- and while, like the bridge, the narrative is built-up over time, parts are pointedly not as presented as they might be in a more traditional work of fiction. So, for example, only midway through the book does de Kerangal have a section 'Sizing up the Place', describing the evolution of the city of Coca from its beginnings to the present-day, from frontier town to the "bored, super-provincial, and so confined" city of the near-present-day and then contemporary Coca, led by visionary man of (dubious) action, mayor John 'the Boa' Johnson, who "sees himself as a Medici", and whose grand ambition is the bridge.
       In her Translator's Note Jessica Moore mentions the challenges of dealing with de Kerangal's writing, as the author: 
is comfortable taking a number of risks with language and syntax, including the omission of articles, prepositions, and punctuation, and the invention of words or new uses for them.
       Credit to Moore for managing the shift into English well, and to both author and translator for their use of language, which is striking but not opaque, and appealingly (as opposed to annoyingly) unusual. De Kerangal's writing doesn't feel willfully experimental, even though she is constantly at play -- a fine ear makes for a fascinating read, at once familiar and yet strange, contemporary yet constantly echoing -- sometimes with a wink -- prose of previous eras.
       If there is any weakness it is in the use of the characters, whom de Kerangal too often seems to want to endow with a bit more character but can't quite, leaving them as cogs in her otherwise well-oiled machinery that don't quite work as they should. Still, Birth of a Bridge impresses on its various levels, from the wonderful writing to its vivid episodes and much of the background-filler, as well as the larger pictures de Kerangal creates out of all this.
       An impressive industrial and workplace (and quite a bit more) novel of contemporary times, by a remarkable stylist. - M.A.Orthofer

 

Naissance d'un pont (lit. 'Birth of a Bridge') is on the surface about just that: the building of a bridge between the fictional Californian towns Coca and Edgefront. The dream of the Dubai-obsessed local mayor, the building of the bridge will in less than a year directly involve attempted sabotage (linked with a death), strong violence, strike action, accidental death, delay due to bird behavior, etc; indirectly, the effects are far more.

Maylis de Kerangal is interested in 'porosité', or porousness, the way things seep through to other things, which she shows not only in her characters (the resemblance between the apparent opposites Jacob and Diderot, for example) but in the words she uses: the technical language of the world of engineering merges seamlessly into the colloquial, and the spoken word — even in conversation — is not marked by punctuation but allowed to join in the narrative flow. And this flow sometimes goes on and on, with the use of very long sentences. So it's not surprising to learn that she was impressed by Mathias Énard's Zone, a novel consisting of only one sentence.

What is perhaps surprising, though, is that there is much humor. This can come in the form of the narrator's mocking repetition, as in 'John Johnson, known as the Boa'; it can come in the deadpan but chilling description of the way Soren previously walked out on his girlfriend: 'hardly has the bear entered the appartment than he turns the key in the lock with a feverish hand, shuts the door on the bear and the girl', which is retributively and laconically recalled in the way Soren (now known to be dead but the reason originally unclear) meets his end in the forest in Edgefront: 'There is a bear missing from the town zoo'; or it can come in an almost slapstick manner, as when Shakira joins the cranedriver Sanche — who is armed with a liter of Jack Daniel's, dry cakes and a CD player — in his cabin fifty feet up in the air for cramped sex.

Some of the names are playful too, as in the architect Ralph Waldo, or the materialistic building site boss Georges Diderot, or in the naturalness of Katherine Thoreau.

The bridge is where outsiders of many kinds meet, where history joins the present and the future, where a modern itinerant Lone Ranger becomes a kind of spaghetti western actor in the multicultural internet generation. One of the most interesting books I've read this year. - Dr Tony Shaw

Would you dream of reading a book about bridge engineering ? Well, not me. Yet, I have found myself engrossed by this French novel (Birth of a Bridge, not translated so far) whose main character is a bridge.
Coca is a small fictional American town on the banks of a large river that runs deep into the jungle. It has a rickety old bridge to the poorer neighborhood right across and a mayor full of ambition. Awed by Dubai’s gigantic towers, Coca’s mayor decides to launch a huge  international project for a bridge (reminiscent of San Francisco Golden Gate Bridge), that will establish Coca as one of those big, thriving, international cities.
The novel is as simple and as ambitious as that: to show how thousands of people put their ingenuity, intelligence, physical strength, hopes and emotions into a huge human project. It speaks not only of money and power, of the technicalities of designing a suspension bridge, of the subtle art of making concrete and, but also on the people who intermingle in Coca, from the site foreman to the odd female engineer, the crane operator or the lowly truck driver.
The novel has more than a dozen of main characters, who have all converged to Coca as soon as the invitation to tender was won, from China, Siberia, French suburbs, to get a job in this project. The building site changes the dynamic of the town, attracting petty criminals and prostitutes, offering new business opportunities, closing down others (barges for example), endangering the traditional way of life of Indian tribes who live upstream, disturbing the  birds’ nesting period, and generating pollution. Kerangal takes everything in, good or bad. Every character has something to prove, some old score to settle, a past to escape, a future to build, a family to feed. All of them contribute to the bridge, all of them essential in their own way.
The writing is hypnotic and sensual like a poem, and quite innovative in French. It is at times sober and harsh, at times epic as if Kerangal was not only describing one bridge, but the destiny of contemporary people: it certainly shows how globalization is a wonderful and awful thing at the same time. It celebrates human enterprise and energy, its capacity to harness natural forces of earth and water, but doesn’t avoid its potentially harmful, violent and dangerous implications. - Smithereens

This is the diary of the birth of a megaproject that will transform the mythical city of Coca into an international port.  The city is located somewhere between San Francisco Bay and Sacramento.  It was one of the pueblos established along the coast of California, but remained a provincial town.  Now the new Mayor wants to turn it into a thriving twenty-first century port.  To do so he must build a bridge to the other side of the Coca River that the City is built on.  The new port will also be on the ‘other’ side.

The story is a microcosm of how international consortiums go into an area and build something that will change the area forever.  We have the story of the Mayor (John Johnson known as the Boa) fighting the PTB (powers that be) that have been in charge of Coca since its’ founding and don’t want to give up control to some upstart.

We see the actual building of the bridge through its’ management and workers who have to meet deadlines that they have no say in and work under conditions most of us would abhor.  To save money, the Consortium backs the using of as many unskilled workers as they can, housing them in what can only be described as hovels.  Since there isn’t a really large town, the workers are forced to choose between bars where the prices are jacked up and nothing.  For those trying to make money to get ahead it could mean eighteen months of grueling work with no respite.

The Bridge itself is the most important character since everything that happens around and because of it has a major effect on everyone in Coca.  Of course all of the participants in the construction are flawed in their own way, and we wonder if this will flaw the project.  The project manager is Georges Diderot, a man described like an old fashion ‘mountain man’ in size and reputation.  Diderot has the complex job of coordinating the job and dealing with the personalities of the workers.

Among the management are Summer Diamantis, aka “Miss Concrete,” who’s in charge of both content and construct.  She’s used to being a pioneer in her field, and shaping concrete is a way of escaping her past.  Sanche Alphonse Cameron, is the chief crane operator, whose job is to place each piece of prefabricated steel within half a foot of where it’s to be anchored.

Told on a sweeping scale that would please John Ford or Cecil B DeMille, de Kerangal (and her translator Jessica Moore) do a marvelous job of bringing the power of the bridge to the printed page.  

- Zeb Kantrowitz 

 
Beware when you read the recent Naissance d’un Pont (Birth of a Bridge, Maylis de Kerangal, 2010): somewhere between the frontispiece and the finale, your way of life, your line of work, your life philosophy or at least one thing that you hold dear will come under the blows of the narrator’s biting derision. In this epic tale, Kerangal chronicles the construction of an imaginary bridge in the fictional town of Coca in California through the points of view of the most diverse agents of its creation, from truck driver to architect. Not one of them will find comfort in the narrator’s tone, one that is at once sharply destabilizing and refreshingly innovative.
In this novel, Kerangal is not one to fall easily for lyricism, and she makes it clear from the get go. Her characters survive; for the most part, they prosaically aspire to more money and social recognition. Kerangal irrigates all these desires with equal amounts of derision. The long, run-on sentences flow in easily read streams that attempt to replicate the thinking processes of her characters and at the same time reduce these thoughts to simple tricks. As the novel goes on and we meet more builders, we expect at the turn of every page for a character, a cause, an idea, a concept, a feeling even to be taken up by the author as superior and worthy of extraordinary interest; all in vain. Where we find lyricism and beauty is through the characters’ obsessive outlook on the land and the bridge: the town of Coca transformed when the building master Diderot flies his bike in the early morning, the sense of flowing functionality taken by the mortar factory under the eyes of mortar professional Diamantis and the feeling of ease crane operator Sache gets when he is at the top of everything.
The objectivism is not tonal only: Kerangal’s digging in the characters’ pasts to find reasons for their actions reminds us of Toni Morrison’s everlasting desire to explain without justifying. She tells us an anecdote to explain why Buddy Loo, an African American worker, “limits contacts” with the white upperclass Summer Diamantis, an anecdote in which Loo was unfairly punished by the law after he rescued a drunk white woman in a casino parking lot. In painting Thoreau’s harsh living conditions at home, with a brutal yet disabled husband and children she strives to feed, Kerangal sets up the explanation for her cheating behavior. The resulting atmosphere is one of brutal cause and effect, in which no character is blamed or chastised because no character seems to have any choice.
We search in vain for someone or something to care about and the narrator knows this. We read sometimes anxiously to find out how something we do care about is reduced to a few fundamental human impulses. Everything passes as indistinguishably uncared for, especially political ideals. One page we think that the narrator is conservative, deriding the mayer’s dreams of a “maze of malls with small fountains and cappuccino kiosks”, the next her contempt of “pamphlets decrying the uniformity of cities, fast food restaurants” and “specificities of identity” portray her as rather globalist.
This peculiarity of tone can be what you want – a capacity to tell a tale without falling into the intellectual cubicles we know and expect, or an incapacity to decide what the narrator thinks. Either way, this indecisive or truth-seeking narrator knows what she’s doing and she tells us so. In the fist fight between Diderot, the master builder who represents a goal-oriented life led by markets and laws of survival, and Jacob, the advocate of traditions (a beautiful, breath taking climax that gives the impression of being the center of a storm), the narrator claims not only that she cannot team up but also that seeing the scene, no spectator could possibly team up. The narrative ambiguity of Birth of a Bridge is contained in this one passage: “If one had been present at the brawl – the bridge against the forest, economy against nature, movement against immobility – one would not have know whom to encourage” (124). It is a strong claim to extend to the general public, indicating that if the spectator knew all the details with as much overhanging authority as the narrator, they might, like her, refrain from judgement.
The end is a bright note. Katherine Thoreau, who has a husband and children, and Diderot, who does not expect to see her ever again, except perhaps as one of the women he spends a night with in all the cities he travels around the world, share a moment of joy and affection like a breeze caught in a desert. Their instant of happiness as they swim in the river next to the finished bridge is placed outside of all institutions, outside of the comfort of future plans, far from concerns for the general movement of the world (they have to sweep off a sandal and a “box of Campbell’s Soup” to catch the stream). If the narrator has an opinion in this novel, it might that this is where rare moments of independent happiness are to be found. - Virgil Blanc

Maylis de Kerangal, The Heart (Mend the Living), Trans. by Sam Taylor, Macmillan, 2016.


excerpt


Just before dawn on a Sunday morning, three teenage boys go surfing. Returning home, exhausted, the driver lets the car drift off the road into a tree. Two of the boys are wearing seat belts; one is sent through the windshield. He is declared brain-dead shortly after arriving at the hospital. His heart is still beating.
The Heart takes place over the twenty-four hours surrounding a fatal accident and a resulting heart transplant as life is taken from a young man and given to a woman close to death. In gorgeous, ruminative prose it examines the deepest feelings of everyone involved--grieving parents, hardworking doctors and nurses--as they navigate decisions of life and death. As stylistically audacious as it is emotionally explosive, Maylis de Kerangal's The Heart has mesmerized readers in France, where it has been hailed as the breakthrough work of a new literary star.


"Not only does Kerangal spellbindingly express her characters’ inner voices, but she also uses them as vehicles for richly faceted inquiries into the history and procedures of transplants, profound questions about the body and the soul, the art of surfing, the engine of lust, and the joy and anguish of love. Everything is alive and scintillating, from a rowdy soccer game to a trip to Algiers, where endangered goldfinches are captured for their exquisite songs. Kerangal infuses each beautifully rendered element with multiple dimensions of meaning and emotion to create a sensuous and propulsive novel of tragedy and hope." —Donna Seaman


"[De Kerangal's] writing is uncommonly beautiful and never lacking humanity. The poetic interrogation of our contemporary medical reality affords a view only literature can provide." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)


“I read The Heart in a single sitting. It is a gripping, deceptively simple tale—a death, a life resurrected—in which you follow along as everyone touched by the events is made to reveal what matters most to them in their lives. I was completely absorbed.” —Atul Gawande


“If function dictates form, Maylis de Kerangal’s The Heart is a perfect novel—its writing as measured and precise as a scalpel in the hands of a gifted surgeon. The pure beauty of these short, sharp cuts has produced a devastating and brilliant work.” —Anita Shreve


"[The Heart] is a splendid title and a splendid book . . . A heart transplant must be performed in the 24 hours following death, or not at all. This novel is about what happens during these 24 hours. Between the moment when a 20-year-old dies and the moment his heart finds a home in the body of a 50-year-old woman. Maylis de Kerangal describes with frantic energy and wonderful tenderness all the people, all the individual stories, all the griefs and hopes that are involved in this process . . . Before this fifth novel, [de Kerangal] was considered one of the most promising French novelists. [The Heart] is more than a promise; in France it was an immediate bestseller, and has remained so from the beginning to the end of 2014 and reconciled the most demanding literary critics with the largest audience." —Emmanuel Carrére


The Heart is a transplant novel. The story, essentially covering little more than a twenty-four-hour span, of a heart beating in one healthy young body that winds up beating in another body and everything (well, a lot) that happens along the way.
       The original French title (and the UK/Canadian one, and the one used in all the other translations ...) is taken from a Chekhov play (Platonov): "Что делать, Николай ? / Хоронить мертвых и починять живых !" -- translated by Taylor (it's mentioned in the novel) as: "What shall we do, Nicholas ? Bury the dead and mend the living". In fact, little of either takes place over the course of the novel: young Simon is not buried, and most of the mending, whether physical (as in the patients who receive his organs) or otherwise (his parents and girlfriend coming to terms with his death) is only in its early stages here. What Kerangal focuses on is the transition(s).
       It begins with Simon's death: an avid surfer, he heads out with two friends early one morning to get in some spectacular surfing. He doesn't die in a surfing accident, but rather on the way home. And he doesn't die immediately -- not with the finality of what we generally think of as "dying".
       Early on Kerangal has one of her doctor's recall the paradigm-shifting recognition of so-called brain death, Mollaret and Goulon's 1959 concept of the coma dépassé:
Even now, the enormity of their announcement stupefies him. Because what Goulon and Mollaret said that day could be summarized in a single phrase that was like a cluster bomb exploding in slow motion: the moment of death is no longer to be considered as the moment the heart stops, but the moment when cerebral function ceases. 
       As a consequence, the possibility of harvesting organs from the 'dead'-but-physically-still-viable gained acceptance, paving the way for much of modern organ transplantation -- especially, of course, of those otherwise (and previously) untransplantable organs (a kidney transplant is possible from a donor who remains alive after the procedure; a heart transplant obviously isn't).
       Young and otherwise healthy Simon is an ideal organ-donor-candidate -- his brain was totaled in the accident, but pretty much everything else remained in good working order. Hooked up to some machines, they can keep him (and his organs) going -- albeit simply as a vegetable, without any hope of recovery -- for a while.
       The novel begins with him and his friends, in his final hours. His accident sets into motion a course of various events, from his parents being informed and first his mother's and then (when he's finally reached) his father's devastation to the hospital protocols triggered at various stages, from the initial recognition that they have a viable donor to getting the parents' approval for Simon's organs being harvested and donated (since he's of age this is actually somewhat murky territory, as it seems that the hospital doesn't need the parents' consent and, unless he gave explicit instructions to the contrary, they're pretty much free to harvest away) to the actual surgical procedures.
       Kerangal's story moves back and forth across the various people touched by Simon's death -- family; the doctors, nurses, and administrators in their various roles. She's very good at this, her scenes penetrating and revealing, honing in on various individuals, with overlap limited to where their paths and stories intersect. Character background is kept at just the right level -- limited but sufficient -- while a variety of incidental preoccupations (hoping for a cellphone call; the Italy-France football match that night) also add a realistic element. It is a lot of characters to juggle, and arguably some get short shrift; in completing the transplant-tale, Kerangal also keeps the number of story-lines down by only focusing on one organ-recipient (getting the heart), even as Simon's lungs, kidneys, and liver are also destined for other bodies.
       The novel is written in the present tense, which makes for a sense of great immediacy (though admittedly, at least in the English, this also lends it an odd passivity -- striking given how emotional and action-packed, in many ways, the story itself is). The novel is cinematic in its presentation, the scenes unfolding precisely, the story advancing like the clockwork which the medical professionals are so attentive to (every minute matters, but there is also a great effort not to (needlessly) rush anything). But this isn't clinically documentary fiction, it isn't a screenplay-account: Kerangal adeptly uses style and language in allowing her story -- and all these stories -- to unfold.
       Even the simplest incident or observation often reverberates -- an idea Kerangal already puts in the reader's mind in how she brings one of the doctors on the scene:
     He enters the department by pushing the door open with the flat of his hand, so hard it beats back and forth several times after he has gone.
       The Heart is a novel full of such after-echoes -- most obviously at its very heart (Simon's).
       Detailed, but not too technical, The Heart offers a vivid tour of the transplantation-procedure, beginning (someone winds up brain dead) to end (the actual organ removal and transplantation), and is especially strong on the human factors -- how parents, facilitators, and medical personnel handle such delicate matters.
       Kerangal handles this material very well, her tone not documentary-neutral but also not giving in to pathos (as it easily could). It is a sympathetic and understanding account, while she avoids being judgmental. She conveys all the mix of emotions and rationalizations that this extreme situation brings with it -- an impressive day-in-the-life of a group of people touched by these extraordinary circumstances.
       The Heart is an exceptionally good novel; Kenrangal does almost everything very well, and the lapses of language or characterization are fairly few and mild. But this is a transplant novel. A medical novel, with a tragedy at its heart. It's not so much that it isn't for the squeamish -- Kerangal does describe some of the medical procedures in detail, but here she is appropriately clinical, and it's hardly very gory -- but many readers might find the story unsettling and disturbing, given that it deals so closely with death and the organs from a loved one's body being harvested. In real life, too, of course, such a situation would seem too much and too hard to handle so quickly -- that's part of what Kerangal wants (and manages) to convey -- but that doesn't make it easy reading. - M.A.Orthofer

It starts with a description of the thing: what it does, how we relate to it, how we describe it. The heart of Simon Limbres—the character who will lose his life—is more than just the tissue and blood and valves that make it up, but a kind of catalyst for the life he has led until this day. The Heart, Maylis de Kerangal’s eighth book in French and her third to be translated into English, drops its readers into the life of Simon Limbres and documents the reverberations of his death felt within his family, community and through France. The Heart is, quite simply, breathtaking in its linguistic precision and impressive in its narrative vision, a feat of textual dexterity made visible in English by Sam Taylor's excellent translation.

This riveting novel begins in the most quotidian circumstances: Simon Limbres heads out with friends one early Saturday morning for some surfing. In these first few chapters, Kerangal focuses on the tangible, on the boys’ bodies. At this moment, she is only an observer, and carefully deploys these details to amplify the relationship between humans and nature. The boys head out into the waves, both the seriousness of the activity and the excitement tangible on the page. “Simon floats . . . Everything around him is in flux: whole sections of sea and sky appear and disappear with each eddy of the slow, heavy, wood-like surface, like cool lava. The harsh dawn burns his face and his skin tightens, his eyelashes hardening into vinyl, the lenses behind his pupils icing over as if they’d been forgotten at the back of a freezer.” Much of the story to come will amount to a deconstruction of Simon’s body, his organs discussed in isolation fromthe rest of his body, from his identity as Simon Limbres. Hours before his death, as he comes closest to nature, Simon is still bound to the outside world by virtue of his complete body. In this scene, Kerangal hints at how fragile these human bodies really are: “He lets out a yell as he takes this first ride, and for a moment of time he is in a state of grace . . . the space closing in on him, crushing as it liberates, saturating his muscle fibers, his bronchial tubes, oxygenating his blood. The wave unfolds in a vague temporality—slow or fast, impossible to tell—suspending each second until the surfer ends up pulverized, a senseless heap of flesh.”
The Heart (Réparer les vivants) is Maylis de Kerangal’s eighth book, and its stylistic dexterity is testament to Kerangal’s well-honed voice. Her first novel translated into English, Birth of a Bridge followed the lives of a community of scientists and engineers, public service workers and citizens, working together to build a bridge in a fictional California town. Ultimately, Kerangal’s novelistic gaze was trained upon the consequences of relationships within a small community. It comes as little surprise that she would do the same in The Heart, which similarly spotlights people’s motivations and interests, and how easily disparate groups can affect one another in a short amount of time.
The entire story turns on a crash. A moment of hazy inattention that sends the boys careening off the side of the road at some 50 miles per hour. In just this moment, the story no longer is Simon’s and suddenly expands to include an inevitable cast of characters: the ER doctor and nurse, Simon’s parents and loved ones, doctors from across France, patients waiting for word of an available and much-needed organ—all of these people dependent on the moment when, as Sam Taylor translates for the US edition, “suddenly everything raced out of control.” His words make us aware of the consequences of the morning early on, hours before the boys head out that fateful morning. This decision proves a striking contrast to the UK/Canada translation, where Jessica Moore describes the beginning of the day with "and everything suddenly shot ahead.” While Moore's words give the story its proper catalyst, it is Taylor who reminds us of the scattered and unintentional repercussions of death. In this larger cosmic sense, everyone's life slips through their hands. Taylor’s attention to the “race” and “control” of the plot imbue his prose with an ominous quality.
Here begins Kerangal’s magnificent feat of omniscience: she jumps from Simon’s parents, first Marianne and then Sean, to the ER doctor on duty, Pierre Révol (and eventually others):
yes, there it is, that’s death. An abrupt vision, like a hard slap in the face, but Révol does not blink, concentrating on the body-scan pictures that appear on his computer screen . . . Révol can read these images, what they say about the patient’s state and what they augur for his future; he recognizes those shapes, those marks and haloes, interprets those milky rings, deciphers those black spots, those legends and codes; he compares, checks, recommences, continues his investigation until the inevitable conclusion: Simon Limbres’s brain is dying; it is drowning in blood.
Pierre Révol’s analysis, his comfort in reading charts and more generally, the human body, come from years of experience and in turn we trust Kerangal’s portrayal because she so successfully establishes the verisimilitude we need to suspend disbelief. His well-worn knowledge makes the scene feel almost banal: it is beyond serious for Simon’s family, and no doubt for Révol as well, but it is his job, a job he has been performing for years.
Throughout all this, as if Kerangal were not orchestrating an already multi-layered scene, we learn that a major soccer game is hours away. As the doctor on duty at the Biomedical Agency, Marthe Carrare, is calling the various hospitals with patients awaiting a matching organ for transplant, she drifts away from the work at hand and fantasizes about the lives of a wealthy local family, known for producing influential doctors in nearly every field of medicine. This particular portrait of Marthe Carrare is dense with the realities of life: everything hangs in the balance, and yet she is dissatisfied with her daughter’s marriage, she is distracted by the neighboring commotion of a soccer game, she is reminded of her years in school. It is impossible for anyone to be so completely consumed by one fact, one story and as if it were her goal to reflect the multitudes of reality Kerangal gives us Marthe’s own life as a sort of respite from Simon’s.
The calm and precision and near banality of the work that Pierre, Thomas Rémige, and Marthe do is countered by the heavy emotions that Simon’s parents (Sean and Marianne) and his girlfriend, Juliette, suffer. The hospital calls Marianne once they learn who the victims of the crash are. She is half asleep but is jolted awake upon hearing Simon’s name. Rushing out of her home, she is confronted by her own emotions:
The city was sleeping, but to Marianne there was something menacing about it; she had the sailor’s fear of a calm, flat sea. It even seemed to her that the space around her was bulging slightly, as if to contain the phenomenal energy lurking inside the matter, that internal power that might easily turn to dazzling destructive power with the splitting of a few atoms.
Kerangal’s writing here is even more cinematic than it has been throughout the rest of the novel: each second, each moment is detailed with Technicolor intensity. Now, more so than at any other moment, we must pay attention. She reduces speed and narrows her focus upon Marianne, who is moments away from that release of painful energy, from confronting the death of her son. Marianne fumbles through this progress in time: there is no link between that reality wherein Simon was alive and that reality wherein he is dead. When she meets Révol, she is taken into his office and brought closer to that moment of recognition. Révol hands her coffee and searches for the right words to say.
Now Marianne closes her eyes and drinks, concentrating on the burning liquid in her mouth, dreading the first word of the first sentence—the doctor’s jaw tensing, his lips opening, stretching, teeth appearing, the end of the tongue flickering into sigh occasionally—that tragedy-soaked sentence that she knows is about to be spoken. Everything in her withdraws, stiffens, her spine pressing against the back of the (wobbly) chair, her head driven back: she would like to get out of here, run to the door and escape, or disappear through a trapdoor opening suddenly beneath her feet, so she can enter a black hole of forgetfulness, so no one in this building can find her, so she need never know anything other than the fact that Simon’s heart is still beating . . . each second is a hard won treasure.
Marianne will suffer through another rupture in reality, later when she gets a hold of her husband Sean. When he finally calls her back, she is away from the hospital, downing a gin at a local bar. She is “rendered speechless by the horror she feels at hearing that voice she loves so much, that voice familiar to her as only a voice can be, but become suddenly strange, abominably strange, because it comes from a space-time where Simon’s accident never occurred . . . it was dissonant, this voice, it disorchestrated the world, tore apart her brain: it was the voice of life before . . . she has to put an end to the anachronism of this voice.” Most of the story is dedicated to Marianne and Sean. It’s only appropriate: their pain is so tangible, so real and yet, “there is no possible translation for what they are feeling; it strikes them down in a language that precedes language.” This is grief and Kerangal perfectly narrates the paradox of it all: how universal and isolating a feeling it can be.
But the story isn't just about grief. Simon's relationships, particularly with his girlfriend Juliette is revisited. Their love is powerful and cinematic, much like Simon's death. Because it is a young love, the pain is all the more real. Marianne, the mother, wonders what will happen to this love once the heart is outside of the body. “What will become of Juliette's love when Simon's heart starts to beat inside a stranger's body?” And what of Juliette's body? She rushes to Simon's home when she hears the news, disregarding the layers of protection she might need to confront the elements. The consequences of death manifest in very real, physical ways.
soon the glass-sharp cold started to burn, she was consumed on the slope, a figurine broken into pieces, almost falling several times as she struggled to coordinate her strides, breathing badly—not at all the way Simon had taught her to breath, with no regularity, forgetting to exhale—her tibias aching and heels burning, ears popping like they did in a landing plane, and a stitch stabbing at her side
There is still so much for Sean and Marianne to do. Thomas Rémige, an ICU nurse and tissue and organ organizer for the local hospital, must pull Simon’s parents back to reality, long enough to continue his job. Consent must be granted for the organ removal: the kidneys, the liver, the lungs and the heart. In these passages Kerangal’s attention to detail and devotion to the research necessary to make this all believable shines. In this “surgical theater,” each doctor arrives and performs their act with the corresponding organ efficiently. Kerangal narrates with technical precision, employing medical terms and describing the procedures with confidence. Kerangal is as meticulous as a medical textbook and thankfully, does not rely on gruesome and bloody details (though of blood, I am sure there is plenty). Each procedure of removal lasts a few short paragraphs: the doctors rarely communicating with each other save when it is essential, and their roles are contained within them. For this brief moment, emotion is put on hold and we are standing just behind the operating table, observing like a student of medicine. The hours it takes to remove “(1) the kidneys; (2) the liver; (3) the lungs; (4) the heart” leaves every player exhausted; the seven pages of rapid-fire surgery leaves the reader exhausted as well.
When Pierre Révol sits with the two parents, he asks them how closely each of them has ever come death. Most people in the Western world are lucky enough to confront death through a grandparent, an older person, or perhaps only on TV. Yet shows like CSI and Six Feet Under are less a meditation on death and more a map of the lives of the living. Where television comes up short, literature—and most especially Maylis de Kerangal’s writing—proves its metaphysical worth: “So the dead body, a repository of unrevealed secrets, of narrative and dramatic possibilities, is ultimately used to keep death at a distance.” In The Heart, Simon Limbres’s body becomes a tool for exploration, we are confronted with consequences of death: whether steeped in sadness or hope, the consequences remain and ramify. - Alexandra Primiani