Jan-Philipp Sendker’s The Art of Hearing Heartbeats pulls out all the stops. Set in Burma (now Myanmar), it is the consummately romantic story of an abandoned and traumatized orphan boy, Tin Win, whose adoptive mother and the monks at the local monastery slowly enable him to make connections with the world beyond. It is both a look back at the past and a look forward into the future, as the boy’s story develops and he learns to love. The novel is also a triumph over adversity, as two characters, one blind and one crippled, movingly overcome their “handicaps” and no longer see themselves as any different from anyone else. The blind character learns to listen to the world so carefully that he can find people by listening for their unique heartbeats. The crippled character has a voice so beautiful that people come for miles to hear her sing. And it also a novel of suspense, as Julia Win, the young American daughter of Tin Win, searches for her missing father, traveling into rural Burma in search of the writer of a love letter from almost fifty years ago, which Julia has found among her father’s effects. Throughout the novel, the involvement of Burmese astrologers and helpful Buddhist priests add another dimension, both magical and mystical, to the thinking of the Burmese characters. Stories within stories within stories keep the love stories swirling and the sense of otherworldliness growing.
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This tiny book, closer to a short story than to a novella, was the last piece of fiction by author Joseph Roth (1894 – 1939), and was published posthumously in 1940. As such, it becomes a particularly poignant study of Roth’s last days as he waited for the death he knew was coming. The Leviathan his allegorical last story, features an observant but illiterate Jew living in Progrody in the Ukraine who has become the premier dealer of coral jewelry for the farmers’ wives in the community and surrounding area. Nissen Piczenik respects his customers, entertains them when they come to town to see his wares, and offers good corals at good prices. Nissen has never left Progrody and has always yearned to see the ocean where his corals live, and when a young sailor comes home on leave from Odessa, he persuades the sailor to take him with him when returns to port. At home, he learns that a new coral seller has set up shop in the next town, and when he meets this seller, he discovers why this merchant has been able to undercut him in prices and lead his former customers to believe that Nissen has been cheating them. Nissen’s world dramatically changes as he comes to know the new coral seller, and one day he makes a fateful decision which changes the world as he knows it. Allegorical, with clear parallels to the author’s own life.
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Set in various countries in West Africa, with one sojourn to Ethiopia, Susi Wyss’s debut “novel in stories” takes advantage of the more than twenty years that she lived in Africa—three years as a child in the Ivory Coast, two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Central African Republic, and fifteen years managing health care programs throughout different countries in West Africa. Her sensitivity to place, culture, and people, particularly those who have left their homes for lives elsewhere, and her sense of honesty and forthrightness give a particular poignancy to the lives of the five women who are the subjects of the stories here. Three of these overlapping stories are set in Ghana, two in the United States, and one each in Malawi, the Central African Republic, and Ethiopia. The novel has much charm, less plot, with characters who feel real and with whom the reader will identify. The places Wyss “visits” are both intriguing and realistic, even including the unexpected violence that appears at some points. The novel is full of easy and obvious cultural conflicts and contrasts, with themes that often appear as moralizing at the conclusions to the stories.
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Author Dieter Schlesak was only ten years old when the Russians invaded his town of Sighisoara in German Transylvania on August 1944, and he has been struggling to understand the Holocaust and how it happened ever since. Though he tried to write a novel about it once before, he says in a statement written in February, 2011, that he “threw 450 pages of an ‘author’s text’ into the wastebasket, because I, as an author, have absolutely no mandate, and could never, even stylistically or linguistically, approach such horror.” Schlesak, however, succeeds in creating a monumental analysis of Auschwitz, almost paralyzing in the completeness of its horror on every possible level, by using a “collective narrator,” a character he calls “Adam Salmen.” Adam as narrator is a Sondercommando of the Jewish “special action squad” under the Germans, a man whose agonizing job it is to report on the deaths in the gas chambers and the tallies of the cremation ovens. Photos, and much of Adam’s commentary, reflect the human side of the Holocaust, smaller pictures of real people performing real actions, rather than the overwhelming horrors of mass graves. Powerful and important.
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Swiss author Peter Stamm has accomplished a remarkable feat. He has written a fascinating story in which marriage is less the result of true love than it is of logic, the resulting union resembling a merger more than a deep human relationship. Passion here has more to do with self-gratification than with true feeling. And Alex, the main character, is so ego-centric that it is difficult to imagine any thoughtful, sensitive woman wanting to have anything at all to do with him. But that is part of the point. None of the three main characters here—one man and his two lovers–are emotionally mature, and none of them grow much during the almost twenty years that pass in the course of this novel. Still, by the end of the novel, the reader will have a fine picture of what true love is, however negatively the characters behave in their own lives and however much damage they may do to the other people in their lives. The negative emphasis actually accentuates the wonder of the positive for the reader. Tightly organized and unusual in its focus on characters who are insensitive and self-involved, the novel has more intellectual than emotional appeal (again, appropriate to the characters), and it is up to the reader to decide to what extent each will be able to understand and feel real love—or become fully human.
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