2021/090: Mend the Living -- Maylis de Kerangal (translated by Jessica Moore)

2021/090: Mend the Living -- Maylis de Kerangal (translated by Jessica Moore)

He likes his shifts, Sundays and nights ... He likes their alveolar intensity, their specific temporality, fatigue like a surreptitious stimulant that gradually rises through the body, accelerates and makes it sharper... likes their vibratile silence, their half-light – devices that blink in the dimness, blue computer screens or desk lamps like the flame of a candle in a La Tour painting – The Newborn, for example – and again this physicality of the work, this climate of an enclave, this watertightness, the department like a spaceship launched into a black hole, a submarine plunging into a bottomless chasm, The Mariana Trench. [loc. 234]

I wishlisted this book in 2016 following a fascinating review in the Guardian; five years later, I decided to purchase and read as part of my non-fiction diet; only very gradually did I realise that Mend the Living is actually a novel. ( Read more... )