Maylis de Kerangal (born June 16, 1967) is a French author.

Quotes

• I am the sort of writer who needs another form to tell me who I am and what has happened to me…I think all my novels are self-portraits, but there’s no one character who resolves me, or catalyses me, or is me.
  • On writing in “‘What is a heart? You have an organ in your body and you have a symbol of love’” in The Guardian (2017 Apr 28)

• I began to think about its double nature: on the one hand you have an organ in your body and on the other you have a symbol of love. From that time I started to pursue the image of a heart crossing the night from one body to another. It is a simple narrative structure but it’s open to a lot of things. I had the intuition that this book could give form to my intimate experience of death.
  • On the heart as the focus for her book Mend the Living in “‘What is a heart? You have an organ in your body and you have a symbol of love’” in The Guardian (2017 Apr 28)

• So the novel is a race, and I can see the finish line from the first sentence: it’s an intuition that magnetizes the entire text. The closer I get to the goal, the faster I want to go. There’s even a sense of urgency, of hurrying, as though I was out of breath and had to, at all costs, finish before I ran out of strength. So I find that my endings are often too quick, not unfolded enough, not majestic enough…
  • On the endings of her works in “Maylis de Kerangal by Jessica Moore” in Bomb Magazine (2015 Dec 15)

• I love when a crucial novel leaves a trace in my memory. In this, its ending plays a significant part—creating a wake effect that is never erased.
  • On the writings that she favors in “Maylis de Kerangal by Jessica Moore” in Bomb Magazine (2015 Dec 15)

External links