Carole Angier
The Dying Light
Scarred Hearts
By Max Blecher (Translated from the Romanian by Henry Howard)
Old Street Publishing 280pp £14.99 order from our bookshop
Both the front and back covers of Scarred Hearts carry a passionate endorsement from Paul Bailey: ‘A masterpiece’. Now, readers, we all have our favourite critics, and one of mine is Paul Bailey. Whenever I have fallen in serious literary love – with Jean Rhys, with Primo Levi – Paul has got there before me. I would have liked to follow him again with Max Blecher, who wrote three short books before dying of TB of the spine at only twenty-nine. Scarred Hearts is indeed impressive – intense, original, disturbing. But a masterpiece, no. Rather, it is what you might expect: a striking early work by someone who might have written a masterpiece one day.
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