Makarius par Sergio Kokis (review)

Reviews 223 structured as it is around a single action: the transplant of a human heart. Simon Limbres, nineteen, is alive as only a young person can be alive, his heart beating furiously as he surfs with his friends in the early morning hours. After a car accident that same heart is kept functioning by machines. Thus begins the series of scenes through which characters’ personal stories lead to the moment where Simon’s heart will be awakened to beat in the body of another human being. It is all but impossible to escape from the premise of the book at any given time because much of it revolves around Simon’s parents and the immeasurable suffering that, for them, has just begun. However, the author’s intertwining of the stories of other characters who are involved in this dance of death and life allows the reader to breathe. Just when the intensity of grief becomes almost too much for us to bear, we are granted a bit of respite through, for example, the ICU doctor’s reflections on his trip to Mexico, the nurse’s passionately sleepless night, one transplant expert’s love for singing and another’s crazy girlfriend, and the future heart recipient’s family dinner. These interludes, far from seeming trivial or inappropriate, remind us of the richness of life and save us in the same way that comic relief in Shakespeare allows us to follow a tragedy through to the end. More remarkable even than this structure is Kerangal’s use of language. Words, here, are more than tools for telling the story; they are part of the story. The shared language of the surfers with which the novel begins is all but incomprehensible to the noninitiated reader, as are the medical explanations, the logistics of organ donation, and the secret languages of art, music and ornithology that constitute the ethnographies of the cultures that collide in this event. Important, too, is the rich semantic field that the narrator cultivates, using nouns that refer to words: exclamations, lyrics, questions, affirmations, prayers, and echoes, accompanying them with verbs of speech and sound to reinforce the impression that,here at least,language equals life.The novel is traversed with devices that allow the unspeakable to be conveyed. It is through simile, pathetic fallacy, metaphor, and even onomatopoeia that characters can articulate the reality of their lives and of Simon’s death. Silence, too, has its place and the narrator provides some moments where no words or sounds can be formed and others, muted, where nothing can be heard. It is not surprising that Réparer les vivants has received much acclaim. Readers may find themselves reminded of life’s fragility but may come to see, too, that the cycle of life and death is just another part of our own next twentyfour hours. Metropolitan State University of Denver Ann Williams Kokis, Sergio. Makarius. Québec: Lévesque, 2014. ISBN 978-2-92418-640-4. Pp. 482. $35 Can. The mime Makarius Steiner makes his third appearance. Kokis admits to being haunted by this character and wanting to do him justice. The reader meets the mime in chapter two: he is seventeen, in Berlin with a traveling circus, fresh from the Baltic provinces. It is just before the Great War. Makarius’s physique is distinguishing: he is tall and lanky, yet a force emanates from him. He becomes more and more successful at interpreting the macabre, “l’esthétique dépouillée, celle des cris et du désespoir de l’homme seul devant la machine, la ville tentaculaire, la guerre et l’aliénation capitaliste” (65). He perfects his career through observation. Even as he is recruited into the war, every gesture he observes is recorded for future use. The author alternates chapters to develop the life of Makarius, and to have him discussed in his life by a painter friend, and an engraver who wishes to immortalize Makarius in etchings, especially his danse macabre for which the mime is renowned. Otto Gorz and Carlos Schulz talk of the role of exile, despair, imprisonment and language on the body of work personified by Makarius. The reader learns...