The Heart

Starred review from September 28, 2015
De Kerangal’s novel pulses with life. When teenager Simon Limbres endures a car crash, he enters a state of irreversible brain death, or coma dépassé. The novel tracks—with panoptic precision—the various actors in the tense and quick 24-hour drama of the harvesting and transplant of his organs. Characters include Marianne and Sean Limbres, the grieving mother and father who must face the modern conundrum of their a loved one being both dead and alive; Pierre Révol, the senior doctor on duty, who is fascinated by the notion that “the moment of death is no longer to be considered as the moment the heart stops, but as the moment when cerebral function ceases”; Thomas Rémige, who heads the Coordinating Committee for Organ and Tissue Removal; Claire Méjan, a transplant recipient; and all the other doctors and nurses who play the carefully choreographed roles in the transplant process. It’s clear de Kerangal has done extensive research, and the novel contains a wealth of medical knowledge. But her prose is more than just technical; the writing is uncommonly beautiful and never lacking humanity. This poetic interrogation of our contemporary medical reality affords a view only literature can provide.

December 1, 2015
Doctors and other medical experts hasten to prepare a young man's organs for transplant and reckon with the need to be both compassionate and precise in a hurry. Acclaimed in France upon its publication in 2014, de Kerangal's fifth novel (and first to be translated into English) reads partly like reportage, detailing how various professionals snap to attention when human organs become available for donation. In this case, the story begins with Simon, a college student left brain dead and on life support when the van he was riding in with his surfing buddies crashed into a pole. A cast of characters enters in rapid succession, including Pierre, the head doctor of the ICU; Cordelia, a new nurse; Thomas, the staffer who assists Simon's parents as they agonize over whether their son would want his organs donated; Marthe, the donor database manager charged with finding appropriate matches; and so on. But de Kerangal also means to explore how what looks like a fine-tuned clinical process from the outside in truth masks roiling emotional complexity. The most fully formed character in both cases is Thomas, who's a classical music fan (fitting for his role as orchestrator) and who owns a goldfinch ("guarded like treasure") that's even more nakedly symbolic in a book about matters of the heart. In the first half of the book, de Kerangal's balancing act is winning and effective, particularly as Simon's parents must weigh reason and raw emotion while the clock is ticking. (And translator Taylor ably shifts between the book's plainspoken and more lyrical registers.) But once the crucial decision is made midway through, the remainder of the book feels anticlimactic. Though there's some drama in finding a recipient for the heart and performing the transplant, the chief drama is settled early. A sophisticated medical drama whose pulse-pounding strength diminishes a touch too quickly.

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Starred review from December 1, 2015
Surfing is 19-year-old Simon's ruling passion. One cold morning, he and two friends rush out before dawn to drive to the northern coast of France to catch a rare and perfect wave. Simon ends up on life-support, and now a very different sort of race ensues. Will his shocked parents allow their son's organs to be used in urgently needed transplants? Kerangal, a prize-winning French novelist, rides a surging stream of consciousness in this ravishingly detailed, high-velocity, 24-hour, medical and metaphysical drama, bringing us into the agitated minds of Simon's mother and artistic girlfriend, the intensive-care-unit doctor and nurse, the nurse in charge of the organ donor process, the head of a transplant agency, and the potential recipient of Simon's heart. Not only does Kerangal spellbindingly express her characters' inner voices, 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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)

September 1, 2015

De Kerangal grabbed both the Grand Prix RTL-Lire and the Student Choice Novel of the Year in France for this gripping, lushly written novel about a teenager's death and the transplant of his still beating heart to a woman clinging to life.

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