“The Art of Hearing Heartbeats” by Jan-Philipp Sendker – The Cruelty of Love

Four years ago Julia Win’s father vanished without a trace, barely even leaving any kind of goodbye. Needless to say, Julia wasn’t exactly unfazed by this turn of events, and though time did help some of her wounds to heal, she nevertheless still has trouble coming to terms with her father’s life and decisions. 

Upon finding an old letter addressed to a woman in Burma she never even heard of, Julia decides the time has come to track him down and find the truth once and for all. Her quests leads her to the small Burmese town of Kalaw, where she is greeted by an old man who promises to tell her the story of Tin Win, Julia’s father, before he ever managed to come to New York.

As it turned out, Tin’s life was everything but a walk in the park, as he had to go through near-blindness and abandonment before meeting Mi Mi at the age of ten, a girl whose physical affliction (crippled legs) allows the two children to grow closer and develop a bond many will unfortunately never discover in their lifetimes.

Jan-Philipp Sendker’s The Art of Hearing Heartbeats is, as you can surely tell, a detective story that very quickly morphs into something much more complex and beautiful; a love story about the type of connection which transcends age, physical appearance or even gender. 

It is about the development of that link between two children who were outcast from the rest of their society for things that were out of their control. It is about finding strength, willpower and comfort in someone else in the face of a future which looks no better than a dark and endless abyss.

Though from time to time Sendker does bring back the idea of it being a mystery for Julia as well as the fact that she is searching for her disappeared father, the truly captivating part is Tin Win’s life before he left for America and all the hardships he had to endure, with Mi Mi being his only source of hope and joy in life.

Though I do have to say that in some parts it feels as if there are too many coincidences and events just happen to be timed perfectly, this isn’t a biography or anything of the sort, so a slight suspension of disbelief really isn’t too much to ask, especially when the focus of the novel is so far removed from this concern.

All in all, though I am not the biggest fan of love stories (as my regular readers know), this one really hit home in a way I still find hard to describe, and it has managed to keep me both emotionally-invested and captivated by the story, something very few love books have managed to do. 

I wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone who likes romance novels revolving around a spiritual bond rather than a physical one. 

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Jan-Philipp Sendker Personal site Jan-Philipp Sendker is a writer of German origin who worked as the American correspondent for Stern, and five years later, as its Asian correspondent for a period of four years. Though he did write non-fiction books before, such as Cracks in the Great Wall, he recently gained some much-deserved attention with the publication of his first novel, The Art of Hearing Heartbeats.