Quest for love and more

Geetu Vaid

Strange are the ways of love — the more you run after it, the more elusive it gets and the more you want to escape it, the more it follows you relentlessly. In a way, love is nothing but a quest, a journey, a mystery. The Art of Hearing Heartbeats is the tale of one such journey that Jan-Philipp Sendker has penned with delicate deftness and poignancy, albeit with a little less credibility. One can be pardoned for cringing a bit on reading the title and dump it as ‘sappy nonsense’ as the main protagonist Julia says in the novel.

The book that has been topping the bestseller charts for quite sometime all over the world is now available in India. It is the story of a quest — the emotional quest of a young daughter for her missing father, who disappears without any explanations, the resilient quest of a man for his lost love, the silent quest of a woman for her soul mate.

Every character is on a journey, outward as well as inward, seeking answers from the world, from people, from circumstances, from tragedies, from places. Julia’s search for these missing answers takes her thousands of miles away to an alien land — Burma — the native country of her father where she meets the mysterious U Ba and ‘discovers’ Tin Win, the man who was her father and witnesses the magic of true love through Mi Mi and Tin Win’s story.

Set in Burma, the novel also juxtaposes the new world ethos with the traditional values. While the fluid prose makes one float on the magical landscape of Tin Win’s world, the plot has a balance of mystery, irony, tragedy and human strength. The writer does manage to keep the “what next” impulse active as one turns the pages. The pathos of an abandoned child, the struggle of a young boy afflicted with blindness, the poise of a crippled girl, the blossoming of perfect love between two ‘imperfect’ persons, Sendker’s story has shades of all these. 

However, it can’t be called a merry trot all the way as the narrative does trip over some rough patches. Consistency seems to be a casualty. While there are some impressive portions that touch your heart like, ‘There must be in life something like a catastrophic turning point, when the world as we know it ceases to exist. A moment that transforms us into a different person from one heartbeat to the next…Or are such moments merely the dramatic conclusions of lengthier processes, conclusions we could have foreseen if we had only read the portents rather than disregarding them?’

But, at several points the narrative gets clichéd and then there are lazy descriptions like those of Mi Mi’s grace, poise and skill, even the images of Burma’s landscape and people seem lame and lack vibrancy. Coming to the plot, one does find it hard to digest Tin Win’s exceptional talents, like his ability to hear heartbeats, then his abandonment of his childhood love Mi Mi, benefactor Su Kyi and later of his family in New York, strike a discordant chord. The story of smoke from the two lovers’ pyres dancing in the sky and meeting and becoming one and the villagers’ reverence for them also need a significant ‘suspension of belief’ to survive through. These jarring notes do mar the overall effect of Sendker’s story. But then there are some impressive ones as well. 

A racy read ideal for a rain-soaked evening, when the boundaries between the pain of losing love and the pleasure of having loved get blurred.