Scarred Hearts by Max Blecher

As this novella is set in a TB sanatorium, readers may look for debts to Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain. The sensibility of Scarred Hearts, however, belongs to another world: Bukovina, Polish Galicia, and German-speaking Prague.

For all Max Blecher’s experience of Paris, this is plain writing, never portentous, always attentive to detail, sometimes surreally funny, and his true contemporaries are Franz Kafka, Bruno Schultz and Joseph Roth.

Review: Scarred Hearts by Max Blecher - Telegraph.