Emmanuel, a young man with spinal tuberculosis and confined to a sanatorium outside Paris, narrates his and his fellow patients' attempts to live life to the fullest as their bodies slowly atrophy and die. Blending dark humor and pathos, Scarred Hearts was hailed as a masterpiece on publication in Romanian in 1939, and was more recently compared to Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain and the fiction of Franz Kafka.

Like Emmanuel, Max Blecher suffered from tuberculosis of the spine, and spent the last year of his life in a full body cast and wheelchair, before dying at age twenty-nine with two novels completed.