The Heart

Under the craft of a skilled writer, even the most straightforward story idea can breathe poetry. Such is the case in de Kerangal’s The Heart, originally published in French under the title Réparer les vivants (literally translated as “mend the living”). From the first line, Simon Limbres is introduced, or at least his heart is,… Continue reading The Heart

Daniil and Vanya

Image courtesy of Shawn M. Kent under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

It’s a familiar story in the North American psyche, a culture of people who are perhaps too eager to adopt, snatching up the first child that becomes available, putting full trust in their adoption agency with reckless blindness towards the traumatic and toxic conditions of those unregulated orphanages: a bright-eyed couple adopts a child from Russia only to find that they suffer from reactive attachment disorder (read: a childhood-trauma-induced lack of empathy that exhibits similarly to sociopathy).