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Fiction Surfing, hickies, and a transplant THE HEART By Maylis de Kerangal Translated by Sam Taylor 242 pp. Farrar, Straus and Giroux Reviewed by Sue Ellis A bestseller in France, Maylis de Kerangal’s The Heart is a fictionalized account of a heart transplant. Readers meet the donor first, twenty-year-old Simon Limbres, who rises from his warm bed pre-dawn to surf a winter sea with two buddies. It’s not the cold that kills him, not a surfing accident, but one of his friends, the driver who, warmed by their van’s heater on the way home, falls asleep at the wheel.  The first few chapters are intense enough that they can almost be swallowed whole, partly due to the shock of a young, healthy man’s death, and partly due to the discovery of the author’s stunning prose. The language she employs (which was capably translated to English by Sam Taylor) is at once concise and impossibly descriptive, and so poetically rendered that it touches a chord that perhaps is not expected. Here’s an ex...