In 1980 Robert Hendricks is an aging man who has become something of a cliche in fiction: a psychiatrist with psychological problems of his own. He receives a letter from an elderly neurologist living on an island off the French coast who says he knew his father during the First World War. Hendricks does not remember his father, who died in that war, and decides to visit Dr. Alexander Pereira.
Instead of telling Hendricks anything about his father, however, Pereira asks him to tell his own war story, from World War II. At the heart of this story is a young woman named Luisa, whom he meets in Italy while recovering from a wound. They spend weeks together and fall in love, but then Luisa disappears. Hendricks learns she has left to care for her husband, a wounded Italian soldier. Hendricks never knew she was married. In the decades since, Hendricks says, "Luisa was every woman to me." He has never been able to form a lasting relationship with any other woman.
After his time on Pereira's couch, so to speak, the psychiatrist is better able to make sense of his own life, better prepared to learn the truth about his father and finally willing to look up old friends from the war, the best friends he has ever had, he realizes. And this leads him back to Luisa.
Where My Heart Used to Beat is a powerful novel, yet one that may frustrate impatient readers hoping for a more conventional love story, war story or whatever. Faulks is the author of Birdsong, another wartime love story that has become a classic.
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