Mend the Living by Maylis de Kerangal review – the story of a heart

The journey of a transplant organ explores the metaphysical zone between life and death, in an excellent novel from the French author

Young Frenchman Simon Limbeau is full of youth, energy, warmth. He’s a surfer, and like many young men he tries to seem uncommitted about everything else – later, when his parents, Marianne and Sean, are asked to describe him, they’ll conclude that he was like a cat, “egotistical and light on his feet”. We see him get up early one winter morning to go surfing with his friends. We see them ride the wave, “this torsion of matter where the inside proves itself to be more vast and more profound than the outside”. On the way home, though, their van goes off the road, Simon goes through the windscreen, and by the time he arrives at the hospital – “Male, six feet, 154 pounds, about twenty years old, car accident, head trauma, in a coma” – his brain is dead. But his good, sound heart is still beating, and thereafter the story is told as the heart’s journey, from the viewpoints of the people who process it.

Pierre Revol, the receiving doctor, has worked here “in death’s vicinity” for 30 years. Thomas Remige, head of the organ donation unit, will persuade the parents to give permission for the heart’s harvest. Cordelia Owl, Simon’s nurse, met an old boyfriend last night –they didn’t spare themselves and soon she’ll have been awake for 40 hours. To Marthe Carrare of the National Organ Allocation, Limbeau is a “relatively rare blood group”; he’s a liver, two lungs, two kidneys and a heart. Who knows what he is to the harvesting surgeon, Virgilio Breva, or to “Harfang” (the latter a demigod who will do the transplant itself, known only by his surname), other than today’s chance to shine, to demonstrate and further their skills?

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