TEHRAN-The Persian translation of the book “Heaven Has No Favorites” written by the German writer Erich Maria Remarque has been released in the bookstores across Iran.

Ajdar Angoshtari has translated the book and Ofogh Publication has brought it out in 360 pages, Mehr reported.

The novel is a bittersweet story of unconventional love that sweeps across Europe from one of the twentieth century’s master novelists, the author of the classic “All Quiet on the Western Front,” 

It is a story about passion and love, set in 1948 with a background of automobile racing. Inspired by racing driver Alfonso de Portago.

The main figure, Clerfayt, is an automobile racer who goes to a Swiss sanatorium to visit a fellow racer, Hollmann, who has tuberculosis. There, he meets the young Belgian woman Lillian, who is suffering from tuberculosis. She is in its terminal stage with no chance of a cure, and she wants to enjoy her last months rather than waiting for her death. She has been talking about leaving the hospital for months and has never gone through with it. 

This changes when a friend of hers dies in that hospital, and she realizes that the corpses aren't named; they're given numbers and treated like cargo. Unwilling to become an unnamed body, she decides to leave the Bela Vista sanatorium with Clerfayt after having gone out with him the night before.

Together, they travel over Europe while Lillian indulges in lavish dresses and food, using the money she inherited and that was saved for her by her uncle. 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 internally realizes that marrying Clerfayt would make him a widower within months and refuses the idea. 

Although she loves him, she decides to leave him before they start an actual life together. In one race, after the racer in front of him crashes, Clerfayt is seriously injured and dies in the hospital. Lillian, devastated, returns to Switzerland. On her way there, she encounters Hollmann, 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.

Erich Maria Remarque (1898-1970) was a German novelist. His landmark novel “All Quiet on the Western Front” (1928), based on his experience in the Imperial German Army during World War I, was an international bestseller that created a new literary genre of veterans writing about conflict. The book was adapted to film several times. 

Remarque's anti-war themes led to his condemnation by Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels as “unpatriotic”. He was able to use his literary success and fame to relocate to Switzerland as a refugee and to the United States, where he became a naturalized citizen.

People most widely read literature of the author with his pen name of Erich Paul Remark in the 20th century.

German history of the 20th century essentially marks the biography of Remarque and fundamentally influences his writing: Childhood and youth, the Weimar Republic, and most of all, his exile in Switzerland and the United States. The first publication attained worldwide recognition, continuing today.

Remarque's novels have been translated in more than 50 languages; globally, the total edition comes up to several million copies.

SS/SAB