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  Julia, a recent law school graduate, viewed her father as staid, reliable, out-of-date -- not the sort of person whose life is filled with mystery or who takes an unannounced trip to Thailand.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

RECOMMENDED

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.

RECOMMENDED

Background to Danger by Eric Ambler

First published in 1937

Everywhere Kenton goes, he seems to have the misfortune of finding a dead body with a knife protruding from its back. The police believe Kenton is responsible for at least one of the deaths, so he is on the run. His only chance to prove his innocence lies in recovering the photographs that a stranger gave him while he was on a train to Austria -- photographs he no longer possesses. Unfortunately for Kenton, at least two adversaries are also determined to find the photographs. As Kenton makes his way from Nuremberg to Linz to Prague, a journey that becomes more desperate by the minute, he tries to puzzle out the relationships between the various parties who are after the photographs. Along the way, he attempts to anticipate their next moves, the better to survive the journey.

This formula -- an innocent man caught in a web of intrigue must use his wits to save himself while thwarting the evildoers -- is the sort of thing that Alfred Hitchcock loved to film (Background to Danger was, in fact, filmed in 1943, but by Raoul Walsh). Background to Danger has all the hallmarks of a black-and-white Hitchcock film: a brooding atmosphere, a strong sense of place, quirky characters, sharp dialog, and suspense that begins to build from the opening scene. Yet the plot wasn't formulaic when Eric Ambler wrote Background to Danger; Ambler is one of the formula's originators, and writers who subsequently followed the formula have rarely done it better than Ambler.

The plot (as we learn in the prologue, it all has to do with oil) is complex without becoming convoluted. Action scenes alternate with chapters that engage the intellect, producing a story that drives forward at a brisk pace without ever becoming mindless. Ambler didn't feel the need to bog down the text with unnecessary verbiage as have so many of his successors; the story is tight. This isn't Eric Ambler's best novel (my favorite so far is A Coffin for Dimitrios) but it is more entertaining than most of the thrillers written in more recent decades.

RECOMMENDED

The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick

First published in 1962; published by Mariner Books on January 24, 2012

The Man in the High Castle is a skillful blend of abstract and concrete, of political theory and the impact of fascism and colonialism on a formerly free people. The novel is many things at once: a story of personal growth; a meditation on the nature and purposes of art; a deconstruction of political doctrine; an exploration of moral philosophy. I don't think I fully appreciated it when I first read it, about ten years after it was published. It still isn't my favorite Philip K. Dick novel (Ubik holds that distinction) but, after rereading it, I have a better grasp of what Dick was trying to accomplish. It is probably the best alternate history I've encountered.

As is true of the best Philip K. Dick novels, The Man in the High Castle is intricately plotted. The first half of the story establishes characters and sets up the intrigue. It isn't immediately clear where the story is headed. The second half weaves together the various storylines, all taking place in a world where Germany and Japan prevailed in World War II. Not every story is nicely resolved, but that's a reflection of life.

The cast of characters includes an Italian fascist, a Nazi, a Japanese bureaucrat, a divorced Jewish couple, and American forgers and dealers in Americana, both antiquities and kitsch. Dick made the inspired decision to write a book within a book: although it is banned in some places, everyone is reading a novel that imagines the US and Britain had defeated Germany and Japan. The device allows characters to compare life in Dick's alternate history to life as it more-or-less exists in post-war America.

To some extent, The Man in the High Castle is more interesting for the questions the characters ask than for the events that shape their lives. Would anyone but Philip K. Dick imagine a German, victorious after World War II, thinking: "We do not have the ideal world, such as we would like, where morality is easy because cognition is easy. Where one can do right with no effort because he can detect the obvious." If there is any context in which doing what is "right" is "obvious," it is Nazi Germany. Yet even in that context a soldier who wants to challenge the leadership of the Reich finds himself wondering whether he is following the right path. It is fashionable to condemn "moral relativism" in modern America, but Dick masterfully portrays the difficulty of viewing life through the lens of absolutism. That is one of many respects in which Dick encourages the reader not just to read and enjoy the story, but to think. This is a novel that benefited from a second reading; I think it would easily bear a third.

RECOMMENDED

Billion Dollar Brain by Len Deighton

First published in Great Britain in 1966

At some point in Billion Dollar Brain, the unnamed British spy from whose perspective the story is told says to an American named Midwinter: "You think the best way to contribute to a dangerous situation is to raise a private army out of your profits on cans of oil and beans, frozen orange juice and advertising, and to operate your own undeclared war against the Russians." That pretty well sums up the plot. Midwinter wants to recruit the unnamed British spy to his private army of agents; the Brit plays along to learn what Midwinter is planning. The premise is thin and not particularly credible, but it leads into a fun, well-written story that feels only slightly dated despite its 1966 vintage (other than giving the book its title, computers are fairly peripheral to the plot, fortunate given that they operate as little more than expensive answering machines).

In its depiction of paranoid overreaction to the perceived threat of Communism, Billion Dollar Brain reminds me of Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove. Kubrick's humor is over-the-top while Deighton's is of the understated British variety -- the film is played for laughs while Deighton's novel retains the elements of a thriller -- but both use satire to make the same fundamental point: "facts are no substitute for intelligence" and all the nefarious facts that could be mustered about Khrushchev's Russia would not have justified the decision to initiate a world-ending nuclear conflict.

Billion Dollar Brain is written with an understated nonchalance, low-key humor perhaps too frequently offsetting the tension of high-stakes espionage. Although it is one of Len Deighton's early novels, he wielded all the tricks in a seasoned writer's arsenal to direct a play in the reader's mind. Dialog often makes the reader picture scenes that are never directly described; non sequiturs force the reader to rethink characters and settings; offhand remarks help the reader imagine the details of a character's personality. The plot takes a couple of perfect twists before arriving at a satisfying conclusion.

Billion Dollar Brain doesn't have the same heft as Deighton's later novels but the story is fun, the characters are quirky, and the writing is so engaging that the novel is of enduring value.

RECOMMENDED