Jan-Philipp Sendker
Paperback | Pages: 325 pages Rating: 4.01 | 65780 Users | 6689 Reviews
Identify Of Books The Art of Hearing Heartbeats (The Art of Hearing Heartbeats #1)
| Title | : | The Art of Hearing Heartbeats (The Art of Hearing Heartbeats #1) |
| Author | : | Jan-Philipp Sendker |
| Book Format | : | Paperback |
| Book Edition | : | First Edition |
| Pages | : | Pages: 325 pages |
| Published | : | January 31st 2012 by Other Press (first published 2002) |
| Categories | : | Fiction. Historical. Historical Fiction. Romance. Book Club |
Narrative Concering Books The Art of Hearing Heartbeats (The Art of Hearing Heartbeats #1)
A poignant and inspirational love story set in Burma, The Art of Hearing Heartbeats spans the decades between the 1950s and the present. When a successful New York lawyer suddenly disappears without a trace, neither his wife nor his daughter Julia has any idea where he might be…until they find a love letter he wrote many years ago, to a Burmese woman they have never heard of. Intent on solving the mystery and coming to terms with her father’s past, Julia decides to travel to the village where the woman lived. There she uncovers a tale of unimaginable hardship, resilience, and passion that will reaffirm the reader’s belief in the power of love to move mountains.Define Books As The Art of Hearing Heartbeats (The Art of Hearing Heartbeats #1)
| Original Title: | Das Herzenhören |
| ISBN: | 1590514637 (ISBN13: 9781590514634) |
| Edition Language: | English |
| Series: | The Art of Hearing Heartbeats #1 |
| Setting: | Burma Myanmar |
Rating Of Books The Art of Hearing Heartbeats (The Art of Hearing Heartbeats #1)
Ratings: 4.01 From 65780 Users | 6689 ReviewsColumn Of Books The Art of Hearing Heartbeats (The Art of Hearing Heartbeats #1)
God, this could have been SO good! I wish Sendker's writing abilities matched his imagination, because this would have been an awesome book. As it was, it was okay. There is a beautiful love story in the center of the book, but it comes to an extremely trite conclusion. Throughout the novel, he relies on some extremely hackneyed devices that, with just a little effort, could have melted away into masterful writing. First device: relying on long (and I mean REALLY loonnnggg) monologue soliloquyWe all come to forks in the road of our life. Julia Win chooses to take the path that may lead to her understand why, with no real hint of the decision, her father one day gets on a plane and never returns.This book isn't a Roshomon, a look at the same event from the perspective of various individuals. Instead, it is an intertwining of threads: Julia's, her father's, and people she meets or learns about when she arrives in the highland Burmese town of Kalaw. More than anything else it is about
I thought I would like this book more but it just didn't grab me as much as I thought it would . There's some lovely writing but what should have been a beautiful love story for me was a bit shallow. More like 2 & 1/2 stars.
The Art of Hearing Heartbeats is unlike any other story I have read. The tale carries the reader through the life of a family man living in New York to his roots in Burma. It is told in such a way that I was perhaps more anxious than the character listening to the story about him to discover how it would unfold!I could not decide on which 'shelf' to place this book. Yes, it is fiction. But it reads as like a very good non-fiction or biography book would. Better, yet, I personally found gems of
This book is a perfect example of what I consider "book club bait." A compelling blurb, major publisher's backing, glowing reviews, eloquent prose, family drama, journey of self-discovery, troubled self-sacrificing protagonist who just wants to do "the right thing."Book clubs fall for these things all the time. While I'd like to think my book club is above the baiting (because we're pretty good at weeding them out), once in a while a book like this one comes along and catches us off guard for
The heart of this novel is set in Burma, pre-WWII. The author Sendker was correspondent in America and Asia for Stern, the weekly German news magazine, for some years. This is his first novel. Sendker was successful and very clever in his choice of subject. In making the setting a mountain province of Burma, a country not much opened to the outside and stuck in a pre-WWII lifestyle, things had not changed significantly since the 1950s and if they had, very few English-speaking eyewitnesses would
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