The Art of Hearing Heartbeats by Jan-Philipp Sendker

First published in German in 2002; first published in translation in 2006; published by Other Press on January 31, 2012

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 takes a flight to Thailand and disappears.  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  Julia, a recent law school graduate, viewed her father as staid, reliable, out-of-date -- not the sort of person whose life is filled with mystery or who takes an unannounced trip to Thailand.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.

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Me and You by Niccolò Ammaniti

First published in Italian in 2010; first published in translation in Great Britain in 2011; published by Grove Press on February 7, 2012

Lorenzo Cumi is a boy in a bubble. He has no friends. As a kid who imagines his room to be "a cube that floated through space," Lorenzo is untroubled by solitude. He believes he would be content as a prisoner in solitary confinement. Lorenzo knows he isn't "normal" but he's studied his classmates so that he can pretend to be. When his protective camouflage fails to ward off the bullies, he imitates the bullies. The pretense allows him to make it through the day without being scorned or injured, but by the time he is fourteen, he concludes that he is only happy when he is by himself. No amount of pretending could change the world outside his house, a world "filled with violence, competition, and suffocation," where "girls are mean and they make fun of you."

To mollify his parents (who worry about his strangeness), Lorenzo pretends he is leaving home on a weeklong ski trip to Cortina with classmates who didn't actually invite him. He plans to spend the week in the basement of his apartment building in Rome, armed with a Playstation, Stephen King novels, and Marvel comic books. He spends his time musing about his mother (to whom he is overly attached) and his rebellious half-sister Olivia, who regards their father as "the master of repression and silence." His days in the basement seem paradisiacal until Olivia shows up. Although she's an unwelcome and annoying guest, her problems force Lorenzo to confront his own isolation from reality.

Me and You is a charming little novel that perfectly captures the hell of being a fourteen year old outsider. It begins and ends with Lorenzo looking back on a formative event in his life ten years after it occurred, an event that may or may not have caused him to burst free of his bubble and accept the value and necessity of friendship. I'm often put off by novels in which a character undergoes a profound change as the result of a single non-traumatic experience -- changes in personality tend to be gradual and stories in which a character suddenly "awakens" to a new view of life often strike me as artificial -- but everything about Me and You is authentic, from young Lorenzo's voice and attitude to his emerging self-realization near the novel's end. The ending is jarring, completely at odds with everything that precedes it, and that too gives Me and You a feeling of genuineness. Some readers might be put off by the ambiguity surrounding Lorenzo's personality change, but what happens to Lorenzo after his week in the basement didn't strike me as necessary information in the context of the story that Ammaniti decided to tell.

Niccolò Ammaniti writes gracefully and economically. The narrative is never rushed or hurried; it evokes a childhood sense of time, when days are long and offer endless possibilities. At the same time, the story moves so swiftly that it comes to an end all too quickly -- yet the slim book is exactly the right length for the story Ammaniti wanted to tell. Ammaniti brings to bear an impressive combination of skill and heart in his creation of this short, sweet, moving novel.

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The Dispatcher by Ryan David Jahn

First published in Great Britain in 2011; published in US by Penguin on December 27, 2011

Maggie Hunt was kidnapped at the age of seven by a fellow named Henry Dean. At the age of fourteen she escapes and calls 911. The 911 dispatcher happens to be her father, Ian Hunt, who has recently organized and attended her funeral. Henry recaptures Maggie before she can do more than identify herself to her father, but her taste of freedom fuels Maggie's resolve to escape again. And, of course, hearing his daughter's voice sends Ian on a manhunt (or daughter-hunt) to find Maggie and her captor.

The Dispatcher has its problems but the pluses slightly outweigh the minuses. The story is a bit twisted (that's a plus) but far from original (a minus). It's more than a little difficult to believe a loser like Henry could commit the crimes he's committed over a period of years -- in a small town, no less -- and avoid suspicion (a minus). As befits a girl who has been held captive and physically abused for half her life, Maggie's mental stability is questionable; in that regard she isn't portrayed as a typical victim (a plus). On the other hand, she's emotionally stronger than a real kid would likely be under those circumstances (a credibility problem that counts as a small minus). Other than Maggie, the characters -- even Henry -- have well-constructed personalities; they have significantly greater depth than is commonly found in thrillers (a plus). Some of the characters have amusing flaws that give them a breath of reality while lightening a dark story with needed humor (a plus). Point of view frequently shifts from character to character, keeping the narrative lively and interesting (a plus). Straight through to the ending the story is simple and predictable (a big minus) but knowing what will transpire doesn't bleed the excitement from the novel's best moments (a big plus).

Although The Dispatcher suffers from an unremarkable plot, the novel's biggest plus is Ryan David Jahn's writing style. He tells a perfectly paced story; fast enough to maintain interest without feeling rushed. He doles out creepy details (like a dog running around with a human hand in its mouth) to whet the reader's appetite for whatever is coming next. He takes a story that's been done many times before and makes it seem fresh (at least until it ends, when the realization sets in that Jahn really did nothing new). His dialog is strong. He puts us inside the minds of his characters and shows us their scattered thoughts, making it easy to understand their (sometimes improbable) actions. Henry is the personification of evil yet he's a credible character. Even Henry's spectacularly dull-witted wife is credible. If Maggie had been more believable and the plot more original, I would give this novel an enthusiastic recommendation. As it stands, I recommend it without urging readers to move it to the top of their reading lists.

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The Odds by Stewart O'Nan

Published by Viking Adult on January 19, 2012

Art and Marion have serious financial and marital problems.  After thirty years of marriage, they are returning to Niagra Falls, not for a second honeymoon but for a final hurrah before their bankruptcy and a divorce that they hope will shelter their assets.  Art and Marion are not a happy couple.  Art views a minor bus accident as a missed opportunity to die.  Marion has perfected the art of ignoring Art.  Although Art adores Marion, she has never forgiven his affair with Wendy Daigle twenty years earlier, while he never even noticed her retaliatory fling with her friend Karen.

Although they plan to divorce, Art and Marion may or may not continue seeing each other -- deciding their mutual fate seems to be one of their reasons for taking this trip.  Art loves Marion and clearly wants to be with her.  Marion doesn’t seem to know what she wants as she vacillates between doing nothing to encourage Art and (less successfully) doing nothing to hurt him.  The novel’s hook is a gambling scheme that might rescue their finances and perhaps their marriage, although the scheme is, for the most part, relegated to the final pages.  Throughout most of the story, Art and Marion are sightseeing or getting ready for dinner.

The narrative is like an intricate dance as Art and Marion move around each other, approach and then distance themselves, rarely saying what they are thinking, topping off thirty years of imperfect communication with a last effort to rekindle a connection that may no longer exist.  If Marion is finally ready to start forgiving Art, he can’t read her well enough to overcome his wariness:  so many of his overtures have been rejected during her “long, bitter stretches of indifference” that he hesitates to risk another.  Marion is maddening in her “now I love you, now I don’t” approach to her relationship with Art, making it difficult to understand what Art still sees in her.  They both have “a genius for self pity.”  Art is driven by guilt of twenty years standing while Marion’s life is largely defined by regret.  Is that enough to sustain a novel?  Barely.

The Odds is more interesting than captivating, in part because it’s difficult to form an emotional connection to Art and Marion.  Stewart O’Nan convincingly illustrates the stagnation of marriage but it’s almost painful to read about two people who, after thirty years together, are either unable to communicate or communicate all too well.  Art needs to grow a spine while Marion needs to give her grievances a rest.  It becomes wearisome to read about two people who are so entrenched in misery, although O’Nan makes the story bearable with his snappy prose and lighthearted approach.  He fills the novel with pithy remarks like “His idea of gallantry was ignoring her shortcomings, which only drew more attention to them.”  The ending is a bit abrupt, the story of their marriage unresolved, but that’s life.  On the whole, this is a novel I can recommend for its funny moments and for the shrewdness of O’Nan’s observations and but not so much for the story it tells. 

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Kurt Vonnegut: The Last Interview by Kurt Vonnegut et al.

Published by Melville House on December 16, 2011

Kurt Vonnegut's last interview was fairly short, not nearly long enough to fill a book. It is joined in this volume with five other interviews that span thirty years. Not surprisingly, this leads to some redundancy; Vonnegut liked to tell the same stories and interviewers tended to ask the same questions (who wouldn't, after all, want to ask Vonnegut about the firebombing of Dresden?). Vonnegut discusses his family in nearly every interview; at least four times we hear that his brother patented the process for making rain with silver iodide. On the other hand, we hear almost nothing about the bulk of his fiction, an omission I found disappointing.

The first interview is actually a compilation of four separate interviews that were cobbled together by Vonnegut himself and published in The Paris Review in 1977. Vonnegut talks about his service in World War II, his imprisonment by the Germans in Dresden, and, in general terms, his writing. My favorite quotation from that interview (responding to critics who considered him "barbarous" because he studied chemistry and anthropology rather than classic literature): "I think it can be tremendously refreshing if a creator of literature has something on his mind other than the history of literature so far."

The second interview was published in The Nation in 1980. It focuses on the firebombing of Dresden (the subject of Slaughterhouse-Five) and on nuclear weapons (featured in Cat's Cradle). Vonnegut's most interesting thought concerns his belief that most people lack enthusiasm for life.

A Playboy interview from 1992 -- the best in the book and the most overtly political -- pairs Vonnegut with Joseph Heller. The discussion is wide ranging and features a fair amount of literary (and non-literary) name dropping. Heller and Vonnegut were both World War II veterans; Vonnegut makes some interesting points about the difference between that war and the bombing in the first Iraq war (including the observation that WWII soldiers hoped they didn't have to kill anyone while modern bomb droppers tend to have no such qualms). Here's Vonnegut on censorship and the First Amendment, a statement I applaud: "your government is not here to keep you from having your feelings hurt."

A 2006 interview from Stop Smiling is notable for Vonnegut's discussion of the artwork he did in collaboration with Joe Petro (he saw it as "protesting the meaninglessness in life"). It also updates his political thinking (suffice it to say that he wasn't optimistic about the direction in which the country was moving). Vonnegut saw the extended family as a solution to the nation's problems, but given the impracticality of the extended family in modern America, he advocated having fun. His most telling statement: "I've said everything I want to say and I'm embarrassed to have lived this long."

A condensation of four interviews between 2000 and 2007 (the last a month before his death) is more of the same, but I was struck by how such a big-hearted man, so in love with people despite his continual disappointment in their actions, was so gloomy about his own existence. In a comment worthy of Mark Twain (with whom he had much in common), Vonnegut said: "As you may know, I'm suing a cigarette company because their product hasn't killed me yet."

The final interview, two months before Vonnegut's 2007 death, appeared in In These Times, for which Vonnegut occasionally wrote. Vonnegut was not well; consequently, the interview is very brief. He discusses religion (Vonnegut was a humanist who came from a family of freethinkers) and politics, including a very funny letter he wrote to Iraq describing the path it should follow on the way to becoming a democracy.

Vonnegut was a national treasure. His fans will surely enjoy these interviews, but those who are looking for insight into his thinking beyond his novels might want to pick up his various books of essays, which capture his worldview in greater depth, including his last, A Man Without a Country.

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