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.
About the Author
Marcel '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.
