Heaven Has No Favorites
 Cover of 1st English language edition | |
| Author | 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 English | 1961 |
| Media type | Print (Hardback) |
| Pages | 302 |
| OCLC | 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, set in 1948 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, Hollmann. There he meets the young Belgian woman Lillian 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. 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 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.
Film adaptation
Bobby Deerfield, a 1977 film based on the novel, starred Al Pacino as automobile racer Bobby Deerfield and Marthe Keller as Lillian Dunkerk.