Reading heartbeats

Had I come here to find my father, to understand him, or to try him?

Jan-Philipp Sendker, The Art of Hearing Heartbreaks

Any parent searching for a runaway child might face these three choices. Is simply finding the child enough, or is there an overwhelming need to punish or, in better parents, a wish to understand the reasons for running away in the first place? Jan-Philipp Sendker's novel The Art of Hearing Heartbeats finds the same questions facing an adult child searching for a runaway parent.

Julia's mother has no interest in tracking down her missing husband, a successful New York City businessman. But the discovery of an old letter from someone named Mi Mi in Burma (now known as Myanmar) suggests the old man may have returned to his native country. Traveling alone, Julia sets off for Burma to find him.

In the village where her father was born, she meets a strange man named U Ba who seems to know all about her father and about her as well. He promises to take her to her father, but first there is a story to tell.

This story, which takes up most of the novel, tells of a boy named Tin Win who is abandoned by his superstitious mother because he is born on an unlucky day, a self-fulfilling prophecy if there ever was one. He is raised by a neighbor. Having gone blind, the boy compensates by developing his sense of hearing so that he his capable of reading heartbeats the way other people read faces. What's more, he can pick out one particular heartbeat in a crowd of people. (The novelist makes frequent references to heartbeats in all sorts of contexts.)

The heartbeat Tin Win loves best belongs to Mi Mi, a girl with a handicap of her own. She was born with misshapen feet and has never been able to walk. They fall in love and move about the village together, she on his strong back while using her own eyes to guide him. They are separated by a wealthy uncle who, thinking he is doing Tin Win a favor, has the cataracts removed from his eyes, sends him to school and then overseas for his business. Eventually Tin Win winds up in New York, changes his named, marries another woman, all the while longing for the girl of his youth.

Have I told the whole story? Not hardly, for Sendker, a German journalist who spent time in Asia, has some surprises I haven't touched on. Even in translation, the beauty of his writing comes through, and even if the pace of the narrative is a bit slow, most readers won't mind.