The Art of Hearing Heartbeats - the international bestselling phenomenon (The Burma Trilogy)

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Even if my sharing it is not well received, still yet have I grown, for just this morning I was out in my garden pulling weeds, and I realized that I was detecting more than just the usual (the sweat dripping down my body, the irritating insects dive-bombing my head, my knees and abdomen aching from bending) - I was actually hearing things that I otherwise had not noticed!

The Art of Hearing Heartbeats Series - Goodreads

Julia learns of two major events that blight her father’s childhood. First he is cast off by his superstitious mother who, after consulting the local astrologer, believes him to be “a harbinger of calamity.” Next, he loses his sight. Julia muses on that “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.” Blindness changes her father irrevocably. His urgent adaptations to these dual calamities – like his preternaturally improved hearing to compensate for his blindness – anticipate Julia’s own ongoing revisions of the image of her father. This overlap of adaptability, discovery and reformulation may be the book’s principal narrative charm. But it also presents certain problems.

I'm also not crazy about characters who tell stories about things that they couldn't possibly know. Tin Win's story is told to Julia by U Ba, an old man that approaches her in a Burmese cafe. He doesn't just know facts, he knows emotions, inner thoughts, struggles, joys, intimate details of her father's relationships etc. I know I used the word fairy tale earlier so I tried to use that to justify this storytelling device...but I think that the book would have worked better for me if we heard this story either from Julia's father directly or from an omniscient narrator because then I wouldn't have to stop myself from thinking "He couldn't possibly know that!!!" 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.

Int’l Best-Selling Novel Set in Myanmar to Be Adapted for Big Int’l Best-Selling Novel Set in Myanmar to Be Adapted for Big

Once again, author and translator alike, have magically strung a beautiful piece of writing together. This book, like it’s prequel is a beautifully written story with a lyrical style that leaves you wanting more. ”—Good Book Fairy

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German journalist Sendker’s first novel, originally published in German in 2002, is a love story set in Burma and imbued with Eastern spirituality and fairy-tale romanticism. But Sendker did more than just excel in describing what any reader could see. He delved into the psyche of the Burmese and showed us folk tales, beliefs, habits, and ways of living. A novel is always suspect in what it reveals, but in this case we can understand as outsiders understand, a way into a South Asia culture that is so remote and so different from modern-day Western culture. And so there must be in life something like a catastrophic turning point, when the world as we know ceases to exist. A moment that transform us into a different person from one heartbeat to the next.”