| The Heart (US) Mend the Living (UK) | |
| Title Orig: | Réparer les vivants |
| Author: | Maylis de Kerangal |
| Language: | French |
| Country: | France |
| Genre: | Realistic fiction Medical fiction |
| Published: | January 1, 2014 (French) February 9, 2016 (US English) June 23, 2016 (UK English) |
| Publisher: | Éditions Verticales (French) Farrar, Straus and Giroux (US English) MacLehose Press (UK English) |
| Isbn: | 0-374-24090-6 |
| Pages: | 242 |
| Translator: | Sam Taylor (US) Jessica Moore (UK) |
The Heart is a 2014 realistic and medical fiction novel by the French author Maylis de Kerangal. It chronicles the events immediately following the death of 19-year-old Simon Limbres in a car accident. In particular, The Heart focuses on the transplantation of Simon's heart and how it affects those involved in the process, including Simon's parents, the physicians, the nurses, the organ transplant coordinators, the recipient, and the recipient's family, over the course of twenty-four hours.
The novel was first published in France as Réparer les vivants in 2014 by Éditions Verticales,[1] and was then published in the United States in 2016 by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux as The Heart,[2] and in the UK as Mend the Living, also in 2016, by MacLehose Press.[3] The Heart received critical acclaim from both Francophone and Anglophone reviewers for its lyrical prose, emotional development, and humanism. It has been performed as a theater play in France since 2015. A film adaptation, Heal the Living, was released in 2016.
Early one Sunday morning near Le Havre, France, 19-year old Simon Limbres and his two friends, Christophe Alba and Johan Rocher, go surfing. While driving back home, the boys get into a car accident, in which Christophe and Johan are only mildly injured while Simon experiences severe bodily trauma and immediately slips into a coma. It is soon determined that Christophe and Johan were wearing seat belts, while Simon was not.
At the hospital, Dr. Pierre Révol, the head physician of the intensive care unit (ICU) department, discovers that Simon is unresponsive to auditory, visual, and tactile stimulation, and that his brain has suffered irreversible damage. Eventually, Dr. Révol declares Simon to be in a state of brain death, in which he can only maintain involuntary cardiac and respiratory functions with the assistance of a ventilator and other machines, and he does not display any cerebral activity. Immediately after this declaration, Dr. Révol deems Simon an ideal organ donor due to his young age and excellent health prior to his passing and subsequently notifies Thomas Rémige, the head of the Coordinating Committee for Organ and Tissue Removal.
Meanwhile, Marianne Limbres, Simon's mother, is the first person to be notified of his admission into the ICU. She contacts and locates Simon's father, Sean, from whom she is separated, and they go to the hospital together to see their son. Upon their arrival, Marianne and Sean are notified by Dr. Révol that Simon's injuries are irreversible and that he has ultimately passed away. Sean indignantly accuses Dr. Révol and the rest of the ICU staff for not doing enough to save Simon, while Marianne, along with her husband, grapples with their son's death and blames herself for failing to protect him from his precarious lifestyle. The couple is then introduced to Thomas, who attempts to convince them to authorize the donation of Simon's organs. Initially, both parents, especially Sean, are hesitant, citing the symbolic significance of Simon's body and their fear of it being destroyed during the transplantation process. Eventually, Marianne realizes that allowing Simon to surf and live his life the way he did was the best thing she and Sean had done for him, and she decides to accept Thomas' request to donate Simon's organs. She then convinces Sean to do the same. Ultimately, Marianne and Sean permit Simon's heart, liver, lungs, and kidneys to be donated, but are unswerving in their prohibition of donating his eyes.
Once he gains consent from Marianne and Sean to donate Simon's organs, Thomas contacts the Biomedical Agency, where an evaluation of the organs is performed and recipients are matched to them. Almost immediately, Simon's liver is assigned to a six-year-old girl in Strasbourg, his lungs to a seventeen-year-old girl in Lyon, and his kidneys to a nine-year-old boy in Rouen. His heart takes slightly longer to find a match, but soon one is found: Claire Méjan, a 51-year-old woman suffering from myocarditis who, after three years of her condition gradually worsening, is in dire need of a heart transplant.
That night, the heart transplantation is performed successfully by Dr. Emmanuel Harfang, the head cardiac surgeon at Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris. Exactly twenty-four hours after Simon first stepped out for his very last surfing session, Claire finally has a new heart, and Simon's restored body is returned to his family the following morning.
A central theme of The Heart is the acceptance of reality and death. Throughout the novel, Marianne and Sean struggle with the passing of their son Simon, a strong, healthy young man who lived his life fearlessly and immensely. Sean experiences a greater degree of difficulty coping with Simon's death, as demonstrated by his fury at the hospital for their insufficient efforts to save his son and by his initial and staunch refusal to authorize Simon's organs to be donated. Meanwhile, Marianne blames herself for not doing enough to protect Simon from his reckless lifestyle, but she eventually realizes that allowing him to lead his life the way he did was the best thing she and Sean could've done for him. Ultimately, Sean and Marianne allow Simon to be an organ donor, which is a milestone towards their gradual acceptance of his death and moving on.
The Heart also focuses on the psychology behind the refusal to donate a deceased loved one's organs, even with the knowledge that someone else's life can possibly be saved. Sean, who is the most resistant to donating Simon's organs, expresses his desire to preserve his son's body and is repulsed by the idea of it being cut up and destroyed during the operation. To the Limbres, Simon's body is not merely a large mass of skin, tissue, muscle, and bone; it is a tangible symbol for his life, for his existence on Earth, and for the impacts he made on the lives of those who loved him most. In essence, Simon's body serves as a memorial in dedication to his life, and ruining it would diminish his memory and legacy. Although Marianne and Sean eventually give their consent for Simon to be an organ donor, they refuse to donate his eyes, thus showcasing the symbolic differences between each organ.
In 2007, after watching a television report on heart transplantation, Maylis de Kerangal wrote a short piece titled Swimmer's Heart for Compatible Woman's Body for Who is Alive?, a compilation book commemorating the 10th anniversary of the French publisher Éditions Verticales.[4] [5] Over the next five years, de Kerangal experienced personal grief and revitalized her interest in heart transplantation, which inspired her to write about the heart not just as an essential organ in the human body like she did in Swimmer's Heart for Compatible Woman's Body, but as a source of love, emotion, and humanism. She subsequently began writing The Heart in July 2012. While developing and writing the novel, de Kerangal consulted with an organ transplant coordinating nurse at the Biomedicine Agency in Saint-Denis, France, who educated her on the legal aspects of organ transplantation and the process of obtaining consent from family members of the deceased.[6] She then met with an emergency physician at the agency who introduced her to Cristal, a software that stores medical records, serves as a database of patients awaiting organ donations, matches donors with suitable recipients, and protects their identities.[4] Finally, de Kerangal observed an organ transplant operation led by Dr. Pascal Leprince, the head of cardiothoracic surgery at Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital.[6] [7]
Upon its initial release in France in 2014, The Heart was widely lauded. French journalist and author Pierre Assouline referred to The Heart as "a novel of great beauty, a writing, a language dazzling" and as "fine and intelligent without ever pushing the collar."[8] In his review, French journalist and television personality Bernard Pivot described The Heart as a "story driven with [the] surgical precision of a heart transplant" and called it "an extraordinary novel that now classifies Maylis de Kerangal among the major writers of the early twenty-first century."[9] French cultural and television magazine Télérama gave The Heart a five-star rating and commended the continuous flow and musicality of de Kerangal's prose.[10]
In the United States, The Heart received similar praise. In her review for The New York Times, Priya Parmar recounted the novel as a "...story [that] unfolds in an intricate lacework of precise detail" and described the characters as "less like fictional creations and more like ordinary people, briefly illuminated in rich language, beautifully translated by Sam Taylor, that veers from the medical to the philosophical."[11] In her critique for the American edition of The Guardian, Lydia Kiesling emphasized on how The Heart embodied the importance of narratives to medicine and vice versa, and also commended de Kerangal as a "master of momentum" who "liberates medicine from the language that, by necessity, has constrained its practice."[12] In an entry titled "A Poetic Novel About Grief" for his blog Gates Notes, Bill Gates described The Heart as "poetry disguised as a novel" that deftly formed a strong connection between readers and characters who appear only briefly in the novel, and that compelled him to "feel the depth of grief," which he identified as a fulfilling and insightful personal experience.[13]
In a mixed review, Kirkus Reviews criticized The Heart for becoming "anticlimactic" in its second half after its crucial turning point and described it as "a sophisticated medical drama whose pulse-pounding strength diminishes a touch too quickly."[2]
Since its first publication in 2014, The Heart has received several accolades, including:
In France, The Heart has been adapted by French actor Emmanuel Noblet into a one-man stage play named after the original French title of the novel, Réparer les vivants.[16] It debuted at the 2015 Festival d'Avignon, an annual performing arts festival in Avignon.[17] Since then, Réparer les vivants has been performed at the Théâtre du Rond-Point in Paris[18] [19] and the Théâtre du Nord in Lille,[20] where it has been well received. Réparer les vivants was shown at the Théâtre du Petit Saint-Martin in Paris from December 12 to December 31, 2017,[21] [22] and at the Théâtre de Sartrouville in Sartrouville from February to March 2018.[23]
The Heart has also been adapted into a film, Heal the Living, directed by Katell Quillévéré and starring Emmanuelle Seigner as Marianne Limbres, Tahar Rahim as Thomas Rémige, Anne Dorval as Claire Méjan, and Gabin Verdet as Simon Limbres.[24] It was released on November 1, 2016, in France[25] and in the United States on April 14, 2017 to critical acclaim. Currently, Heal the Living holds a 90% rating on Rotten Tomatoes,[26] an 82/100 on Metacritic,[27] and four out of four on Roger Ebert.[28]