- Heaven Has No Favorites
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Heaven Has No Favorites 
Cover of 1st English language editionAuthor(s) Erich Maria Remarque Original title Der Himmel kennt keine Günstlinge Translator Richard and Clara Winston Country Germany Language German Publisher Harcourt, Brace & World Publication date 1961 Published in
English1961 Media type Print (Hardback) Pages 302 ISBN N/A OCLC Number 295971 Heaven Has No Favorites (German: Der Himmel kennt keine Günstlinge) is a novel by the German writer Erich Maria Remarque. This novel is a story about passion and love with a background of automobile racing.
The novel was serialized in the Hamburg magazine Kristall in 1959 under the title Borrowed Life (German: Geborgtes Leben), and first published in book form in 1961.
Plot summary
The main figure, Clerfayt, is an automobile racer who goes to a Swiss hospital to visit a fellow racer, Holman. There he meets the young Belgian woman Lillian suffering from tuberculosis. She is in its terminal stage with no chances to cure, and she wants to enjoy her last months rather than waiting for her death. Therefore, after a few days in Switzerland she decides to leave the Bela Vista sanatorium with Clerfayt.
Together they travel over Europe, while Lillian enjoyed things she did not know before. Eventually they fall in love and Clerfayt starts to hope for a future with her. However, when he expresses his wish to settle down and wants to get her visited by a doctor, she starts feeling trapped and refuses the idea. Although she loves him, she decides to leave him before they start an actual life together. In one race Clerfayt is seriously injured and dies in the hospital. Lillian, devastated, returns to Switzerland. On her way there she encounters Holman, now healed, who has been offered the former job of Clerfayt. Six weeks later, Lillian dies. It is described as a peaceful moment, as if even the landscape had stopped breathing.
Film adaptation
Bobby Deerfield, a 1977 film based on the novel, starred Al Pacino as automobile racer Bobby Deerfield and Marthe Keller as Lillian Morelli.
Works by Erich Maria Remarque Novels The Dream Room (1920) • Gam (1924) • Station at the Horizon (1928) • All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) • The Road Back (1931) • Three Comrades (1936) • Flotsam (1939) • Arch of Triumph (1945) • The Spark of Life (1952) • A Time to Love and a Time to Die (1954) • The Black Obelisk (1956) • Heaven Has No Favorites (1961) • The Night in Lisbon (1962) • The Promised Land (1970) • Shadows in Paradise (1971)
Categories:- 1960s novel stubs
- 1961 novels
- Novels by Erich Maria Remarque
- Novels first published in serial form
- Works originally published in German magazines
- Novels set in Switzerland
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