SCARRED HEARTS

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 an irritation. 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.