Scarred Hearts

by Max Blecher, Henry Howard (Translator)

Overview

Emmanuel, a young man with spinal tuberculosis and confined to a sanatorium outside Paris, narrates his and his fellow patients’ attempts to live life to the fullest as their bodies slowly atrophy and die. Blending dark humor and pathos, Scarred Hearts was hailed as a masterpiece on publication in Romanian in 1939, and was more recently compared to Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain and the fiction of Franz Kafka.

Like Emmanuel, Max Blecher suffered from tuberculosis of the spine, and spent the last year of his life in a full body cast and wheelchair, before dying at age twenty-nine with two novels completed.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781905847877
Publisher:	Old Street Publishing, Ltd
Publication date:	06/01/2010
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.80(h) x 0.70(d)
Age Range:	12 Years

About the Author

Max Blecher was born in 1909 into a Jewish family in Botosani, Romania. At the age of 19, he contracted tuberculosis of the spine and spent the rest of his life in hospitals and sanatoria. Scarred Hearts, his second and last novel, appeared in 1937, a year before his death at the age of 29.

Editorial Reviews

Blecher's second and final novel, written when he was 27, two years before his death in 1936, tells the obviously autobiographical story of a young Romanian man's experience after he is diagnosed with Pott's disease, a tuberculosis of the spine.

Emanuel, who has been studying chemistry in Paris, is "terrified" and "bewildered" when he gets his medical diagnosis. His doctors, portrayed as decent, kind men, send him to a sanatorium at Berck-sur-Mer. With a dreamlike sense of detail, Blecher describes Emanuel's adjustment to his new life. Placed inside a body cast, Emanuel feels he has joined a new world of "not being ‘fully alive.' " He debates whether to become resigned to his situation, what his doctor describes as cicatrisation, the growing insensitivity as emotional scar tissue forms. Although Emanuel experiences melancholy he finds he almost enjoys his new idleness. He also finds plenty of friendship, romance and drama within the closed society of the sanatorium where emotions are as often heightened as they are dulled by physical limitations. He witnesses the complexity of the patients' reactions to their illness. Some die, some recover, some who recover physically remain permanently scarred emotionally. Soon Emanuel is passionately involved with Solange, a former patient still living in the town—once cured, many find it difficult to return to their old lives. Emanuel drives a horse-drawn stretcher trolley into the countryside (a photo on the book's back cover shows a handsome, young Blecher in such a carriage beside an unnamed woman) where he and Solange dine at inns and have sexual interludes near the sea. But Solange's devotion, which he has fostered, becomes anirritation. He escapes her and the sanatorium by moving into a villa on the beach. When he finally has his cast removed, he has life-affirming casual sex with an Irish woman, then travels to Switzerland.

Unlike the protagonists in so much recent fiction, Emanuel is never a victim but an acute observer of human nature, including his own.

Kirkus Reviews