Customer Reviews

The Art of Hearing Heartbeats

5 star:		(281)
4 star:		(98)
3 star:		(30)
2 star:		(12)
1 star:		(16)

 

 

If you are an Amy Tan fan and/or you enjoyed 'The Bridges of Madison County' or 'Memoirs of a Geisha', then you will love this book! This is a love story between a boy named Tin Win and a girl named Mi Mi that lasts over 50 years and it's so beautiful, heartbreaking, touching and haunting. This book has the right mix of romance, magic, heartache and inspiration that will make it a favorite for many people. For years 'The Art of Hearing Heartbeats' has been a bestseller in Germany, Italy, Spain, The Netherlands, Serbia, Israel, Croatia and Japan. Finally it has been translated in English and I'm so in love with this story that I've added it to my list of favorite books. I don't write book reports or spoilers in my reviews in order to avoid giving everything away, but what I will say is, don't hesitate to buy this book! This brilliant author, Jan-Philipp Sendker, has gifted us with a story that is so powerful and moving, it will touch your heart and you will want to share it with everybody. It is THAT good.

The first third of The Art of Hearing Heartbeats is enthralling. The remainder of the novel is problematic; it sustained my interest but not my enthusiasm.

After telling her that he was leaving for an appointment in Boston, Julia Win's father boarded a flight to Thailand and disappeared. The Times described him as "an influential Wall Street lawyer" but the police suspect he had a hidden past. Burmese by birth, Tin Win became an American citizen in 1959. Julia, a recent law school graduate, viewed her father as staid, reliable, out-of-date -- not the sort of person whose life is filled with mystery or who takes an unannounced trip to Thailand. Four years after his disappearance, Julia finds a letter he wrote to a woman named Mi Mi. Julia travels to Kalaw, determined to find Mi Mi, the only clue to her father's past. There she meets U Ba, who has been waiting to tell her the story Tin Win told him, a story from which "a life emerged, revealing its power and its magic."

Just as we're settling into Julia's quest, the story shifts to the one told by U Ba. It starts with Mya Mya, a young Burmese woman who regards the birth of Tin Win as a calamity. An astrologer's prediction that he will lose his sight is soon fulfilled. After his parents die, Tin is taken to a monastery. It is there that he first meets Mi Mi -- or, more precisely, that he first hears her heartbeat. Mi Mi was born with "crippled feet"; their disabilities draw Tin and Mi Mi together.

Hearts and heartbeats are frequent images in the novel. Jan-Philipp Sendker also makes good use of the imagery of balance: Mi Mi, for instance, is emotionally well balanced even though she is incapable of balancing on her misshapen feet. Tin balances his blindness with exceptional hearing. Mi Mi and Tin balance each other: when Tin carries Mi Mi on his back, her eyes provide their twinned vision, his feet set them in unitary motion. Julia, despite having all the advantages of a stable, upper class family and western education, finds that she needs to bring her life into balance: understanding her father becomes a necessary condition of understanding herself.

As related by U Ba, Tin Win's tale is a love story that too often shares the characteristics of a well written fairy-tale. There are times when the descriptions of Mi Mi's blossoming love are a little too obvious, too melodramatic, too much like Barry Manilow with punchier prose. Moreover, the description of their developing love creates a dull lull in the story arc. After Tin leaves Mi Mi to meet his uncle in Rangoon the novel regains some of its force, particularly after it circles back to Julia and her uncertainty about her father's love (understandable given his abandonment of her). At that point a different and more original love story emerges, one that addresses a child's love for a parent. U Ba sums it up: "Love has so many different faces that our imagination is not prepared to see them all."

As the novel winds down, we learn the rest of Tin's story. It comes to a predictable finish but (despite its greater length) it seems less important than Julia's. To the extent that Tin's story is about the purity of devotion shared by two separated lovers, I tend to agree with one of the characters who observes that love is a form of madness and hopes it isn't contagious. And as much as I would like to believe in the strength of heart displayed by Tin and (especially) Mi Mi, I found it incongruous that Tin couldn't give the same unconditional love to his daughter, and I was disappointed that Sendker didn't address that incongruity in greater depth.

It's difficult to introduce an element of mysticism in a book that isn't wholly a fantasy. The best writers (Haruki Murakami comes to mind) manage to convince the reader that the mystical is real. That Sendker doesn't quite pull it off is my largest reservation about The Art of Hearing Heartbeats. Its fine prose and entertaining moments nonetheless make the novel worth reading, and an unanticipated twist at the end pays a rewarding dividend.

I read this book based upon another review that said --- "If you like Amy Tan..." (I do), and "If you like Bridges of Madison County..." (I did)... then you should read this book. Having now read the book, I would not go quite that far. This book is not as good as Amy Tan or even Bridges of Madison County. The writing is trite and repetitive. The phrase "children singing" occurs so often you begin to wish the children would just stop singing already. Great literature it is not. On the other hand, the central love story is compelling and would make a fine movie. Indeed, variations of this same love story - two young lovers separated through circumstances beyond their control are spared the messy business of navigating life side-by-side thus leaving their perfect love intact - have already made several dozen fine movies. I did want to keep reading just to see what would happen next and that has to be worth something. In this case: three stars.

I couldn't put this book down. I read it in just a day or two and I found it to be a beautiful story lovingly told by a talented writer. It is magical and poignant; an amazing, achingly sublime love story. It is a tale of faithfulness, perseverance, hope and trust. When have you ever loved someone enough to let them go without hatred or malice? Have you ever felt that kind of deep emotion that rings true thorough out your life despite the circumstances? Funny how people live lives that they know they were not meant to live simply because it is convenient or the right thing to do. As I read this book my heart ached for the characters but it ached also for myself. There is something in this book that will touch you profoundly, spur you onto greater heights. I know this because one can not read this tale without thinking about one's own life and the trajectory it is taking them on. Are you really living how you want, with whom you want...are you really honoring your soul or are you only marking time until some later date? Perhaps we could all learn the art of hearing heartbeats, beginning with listening to our own.

I had parked this book on a shelf for many weeks. It is not my typical fare, but I had heard so many wonderful reviews I wanted to give it a try. I wish I had not waited so long! I literally read it in two days. The author's writing style is fluid and compelling, and really drew me into the story line. I loved the idea of using a fairy tale to intertwine the different segments of the novel. The writing style was similar to Amy Tan or Barbara Kingsolver, two very accomplished novelists and two of my favorite authors. I greatly enjoyed this book, and would highly recommend it.

After reading so many exceptional reviews about this book, I enthusiastically purchased it and am quite disappointed that I did. I truly cannot recall the last time I was so bored by a novel. This book was horrible...I pushed myself to finish it (rather than abandon it, which I wanted to do throughout) since I was certain that SOMETHING was going to happen to change my mind. I should have given it up early on...the love story was a boring, monotonous, repetitive, dull tale that never materialized to be anything more than a drawn out fable. I lost six hours of my life reading this book...SKIP IT.

"Influential Wall Street Lawyer Disappears without Trace" screamed the headlines. The morning after Jane Win's graduation from law school, her father woke her to say goodbye, mentioning appointments in Boston. His family never saw him again, although he was eventually traced to Thailand, where the trail petered out.

Four years later, Julia's mother sends her a box of her father's papers and photographs. Among the passports, naturalization papers (Tin Win had been born in Burma), appointment books, and family photos is a heartbreaking unsent love letter in her father's hand. Jane immediately books a trip to Burma to find the mysterious Mi Mi and learn the truth of her father's abandonment of his family, despite her embittered mother's disapproval.

From there the story shifts into an entirely different tone, lyrical and slightly fantastic; as Julia learns her father's story from an old man in the village of his birth. Born, according to the astrologer, on an inauspicious day, Win Tin was abandoned by his mother after his father's accidental death, for which she blamed him. The rare (in a child) cataracts he developed shortly thereafter left him blind for most of his childhood.

It took me awhile to shift viewpoints and accept the superstitious, fatalistic perspective so foreign to my Western sense of self-determination and pragmatism; but the beauty and curiosity of the unusual tale eventually sucked me in completely. While the story sometimes threatens to topple into sentimental banality, the author somehow manages to skirt that pitfall; and has produced a remarkable allegory of the different forms of love and the possibility of ultimate trust in another. All in all, a beautiful and memorable book which has earned a permanent place in my library.

This is the perfect book to read if:
*You're looking for an ideal book to read around Valentine's Day.
*You're convinced of the transformative power of love to cast out fear.
*You're a romantic who believes that love can last a lifetime, despite distance and absence.
*You scoff at the notion of love and need convincing.
*You need a reminder that whether in Manhattan or a small village in Burma, people are basically the same under the skin. As U Ba tells Julia when she asked why he didn't seize the opportunity to study in England instead of caring for his mother for 30 years, "In this village, in every house, in every shack, you will find the entire range of human emotions: love and hate, fear and jealousy, envy and joy. You needn't go looking for them."

In the words of the author, Jan-Phillip Sendker, "If our lives shall have meaning, we need to love and be loved no matter where we live. That is what my book is about." And it truly is. On the surface, it's a story about a blind boy and a crippled girl whose love transcends time and circumstance. However, it's much more than that. It's about connections, greed, fear, kindness, culture, loss, and devotion.

The book both moved me and taught me. Through Sendker's descriptions of the land, people, customs, artifacts, and food, I learned a great deal about Burma (now called Myanmar) and was reminded that everyone doesn't see the world the way I do. I drive a car and wear shoes. Mi Mi's contemporaries walk everywhere, often shoeless. I read and think and consult others (and God) when making decisions, but many of these people consult astrologists.

A beautiful book, it even includes some of Pablo Neruda's poetry.

This is a book that inspired a very lively discussion in our book club. It deals with moral obligation and the dilemma of following your heart or listening to your head. What is right or wrong depends on your perspective and this book invites you to decide what you would have done given the circumstances. Average writing but thought-provoking premise.

Having been to Burma, and visited many of the sites mentioned in this story, I was expecting a book of some depth, and found instead a fairytale that made little sense.