REDISCOVERED CLASSIC OF MODERN EUROPEAN LITERATURE IN VEIN OF FRANZ KAFKA, THOMAS MANN, IRÈNE NÉMIROVSKY Scarred Hearts, set and written in the 1930s, tells the story of 21-year-old Emanuel, a Romanian student of chemistry in Paris, who becomes ill with Pott's disease (tuberculosis of the spine) and spends almost a year in a French seaside sanatorium, his body wrapped in a plaster body cast. He enters the fascinating, isolated world of the patients, who, in spite of their dying bodies, continue to fall in love, have sex and experience the beauty of life with heightened intensity. Blecher captures brilliantly the process of physical decay and erosion, a ?scarring' of the soul. But in this painfully realist, profound and sensual novel, which has a powerful contemporary feel, Blecher also demonstrates the human ability to remain true to oneself under the most extreme of circumstances. AUTHOR: Marcel 'Max' Blecher was born in 1909 into a Jewish family in Botosani, Romania. At the age of 19, he contfracted tuberculosis of the spine and spent the rest of his life in hospitals and sanatoria. He published his first book of poetry in 1934, and his frist novel in 1936. Scarred Hearts, his second and last novel, appearfed in 1937, a year before his death at the age of 29. In spite of his limited output, he had already become a leading member of the French and Romanian literary avant-garde. His work was forgotten for many decades, and rediscovered in the West only in recent years. SALES * Massively important addition to the canon of 20th C. Jewish literature. Guaranteed reviews * German language edition was voted no 1 amongst 2006's ?Notable Books' in Die Zeit magazine * Introduction to this first-ever English language edition by Paul Bailey
