Sendker, Jan-Philipp "A Well-Tempered Heart"

Sendker, Jan-Philipp "A Well-Tempered Heart" (Burma Trilogy #2) (German: Herzenstimmen) - 2012

After reading "The Art of Hearing Heartbeats" (Das Herzenhören), the first part of the Burma Trilogy, I naturally had to know how the story continues.

Julia Win, whom we already know from the first book, suddenly hears a voice inside her. She is advised to go back to Burma to find out what the voice is trying to tell her. I don't believe in such mystical experiences, but Julia's story on her return visit is very interesting. She learns the history of Burma, meets new people, finds a new love, sees her life with different eyes. And the reader learns a lot about the differences between East and West.

As always, Jan-Philipp Sendker has written a wonderful story about Asia. His language is captivating and this is a very good sequel to a wonderful book.

From the back cover:

"Almost ten years have passed since Julia Win came back from Burma, her father’s native country. Though she is a successful Manhattan lawyer, her private life is at a crossroads; her boyfriend recently left her, she has suffered a miscarriage, and she is, despite her wealth, unhappy with her professional life. Julia is lost and exhausted.

One day, in the middle of an important business meeting, she hears a stranger’s voice in her head that causes her to leave the office without explanation. In the following days, her crisis only deepens. Not only does the female voice refuse to disappear, but it starts to ask questions Julia has been trying to avoid. Why do you live alone? To whom do you feel close? What do you want in life?

Interwoven with Julia’s story is that of a Burmese woman named Nu Nu who finds her world turned upside down when Burma goes to war and calls on her two young sons to be child soldiers. This spirited sequel, like The Art of Hearing Heartbeats, explores the most inspiring and passionate terrain: the human heart."

Craig, Charmaine "Miss Burma"

Craig, Charmaine "Miss Burma" - 2017

A recommendation by my blog friend Judy from Keep the Wisdom, (check out her post here) and I though it sounded totally interested. I had read a book about Burma/Myanmar before, so I didn't necessarily need to read it for my challenge "Travel the World Through Books" but that's not the main reason I do that list.

This story is based on the author's mother and grandparents, so I suppose a lot of the events are exactly as they happened. What a tragic story. If you are expecting a book about how a beauty queen is chosen, I wouldn't recommend it. If you want a book about Myanmar and its history, what they did to the people and why we didn't hear more about it, I highly recommend it. This novel reads a little more like a non-fiction book - which I like. There is so much the author covers about the history and culture of her country here, the different peoples that were thrown together. And we see what this does not only to her family but to all those members who don't belong to the ruling class. Her grandfather was a Jew from India, her grandmother a member of the Karen minority in Burma.

In any case, this is a great book if you want to learn more about that part of our world. And I think we all should know more about it.

From the back cover:
"Based on the remarkable lives of the author's mother and grandparents, Miss Burma is a beautiful and poignant story of how ordinary people come to be swept up in the fight for freedom.

A beautiful and poignant story of one family during the most violent and turbulent years of world history, Miss Burma is a powerful novel of love and war, colonialism and ethnicity, and the ties of blood.

It is 1939, and Benny, a young Jewish officer, is working for the British Customs Service in Burma. One day during his shift at the docks, he catches sight of a young woman with hair down to her ankles, standing at the end of a jetty. This is Khin, who belongs to Burma’s Karen ethnic minority group, which for centuries has been persecuted by the Burman majority. She and Benny soon marry, but when World War II comes to Asia, and Rangoon finds itself under threat of the Japanese occupation, the young couple and their baby daughter Louisa are forced to take shelter among Khin’s Karen countrymen in the eastern part of Burma. After the war, the British Empire strikes an independence deal with the Burman Nationalists, led by Aung San, leaving the Karen and other ethnic minority groups in a precarious position. Soon Benny will become an architect of the Karen revolution, which sparks the longest running civil war in recorded history.

Nearly a decade into the civil war. Louisa captures the country’s imagination, becoming Burma’s first national beauty queen. As she navigates her soaring fame and increasingly dire political reality, Louisa will be forced to reckon with her family’s past, the West’s ongoing covert dealings in Burma, and her own loyalty to the cause of the Karen people.

A captivating story of one family during the most violent and turbulent years of world history, Miss Burma is a masterful novel of love, war, and the struggle to lead a meaningful life."

Sendker, Jan-Philipp "The Art of Hearing Heartbeats"

Sendker, Jan-Philipp "The Art of Hearing Heartbeats" (German: Das Herzenhören) - 2002

Jan-Philip Sendker is a German journalist turned author who has written some fantastic books about his experiences as a correspondent in Asia. So far, I have read "Risse in der großen Mauer" [Cracks in the Great Wall], a non-fiction book about the China of today with all its problems in the modern world and "Das Flüstern der Schatten" (Whispering Shadows), a novel about a guy living in contemporary Hongkong. Both books are brilliant but haven't been translated into English, unfortunately.

Therefore, I was quite surprised that "Das Herzenhören" (The Art of Hearing Heartbeats) has been translated into English as well as its sequel "Herzenstimmen" (A Well-Tempered Heart). This is a fantastic chance for my foreign friends to get to know this wonderful author.

The plot of this story sounds easy. A Burmese man who has been living in the United States for ages, goes missing and his Burmese-American daughter follows a trail to Burma. But the background! There is so much in this story, mainly about cultural differences between East and West. I am not Asian, so I don't know how well he manages to stay close to their culture but I have read quite a few books both by Asians as well as Europeans/Americans who have lived there and I think he is doing a good job.

This book is about love, secrets, deceit, and hope. It tells us a beautiful love story. I really love the author's way of writing, his style is beautiful, his method of informing us about the East-West differences is unique. And he makes us think about the important things in life.

I just love his books.

See more comments on my ThrowbackThursday post in 2025.

From the back cover:

"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."

Dai, Sijie "Once on a Moonless Night"

Dai, Sijie "Once on a Moonless Night" (French: Par une nuit où la lune ne s’est pas levée) - 2007

I always find it difficult to follow a novel written in a female first tense when the author is male. It's probably the same the other way around but I can't follow it that well.

In any case, it wasn't difficult here, at all. Whether that is the case because the author is Asian and lives in Europe or whether he is just someone who can sense others so well, I don't know. All I know is, it works.

This deep and complex story revolves around a French student in China and a Chinese greengrocer. But there are many little stories interwoven with this, the story of Emperor Puyi who loses an ancient scroll and a French linguist who finds it. The novel takes us from the beginning of the 20th century to 1990, from China to Laos and Myanmar and then to France, it spans half the earth and almost a whole century, it talks about history and archaeology, language and politics, but most of all it is a story about the love between men and women, it's as much a philosophical story as well as a mythical one. And, above all, the language is so beautiful, almost poetical. It is a silent book, one of those that aren't full of action, yet there is always something going on. It is a peaceful book despite all the evil in the world that does affect all our protagonists. It gives hope.

I loved this book, give you so much to think about. It is one of the books, when you read it, you know it will become a great classic one day. Because it is timeless. Dai Sijie will go down in history as a wonderful storyteller.

It is just as great as the other book I read by this author "Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress".

The title originates from the old story "Once on a moonless night a lone man is traveling in the dark when he comes across a long path that merges into the mountains and the mountain into the sky, but halfway along, at a turn in the path, he stumbles.  As he falls, he clutches at a tuft of grass, which briefly displays a fatal outcome, but soon his hands can hold him no longer and, like a condemned man in his final hour, he casts one last glance below, where he can see only the darkness of those unfathomable depths." (I have looked up the English translation for this, the original reads: "Par une nuit où la lune ne s'est pas levée", un voyageur solitaire progresse sur un chemin escarpé, fait un faux pas et tombe. Par qui, par quoi sera-t-il sauvé de cette chute? Ceux qui sont en quête de ce texte seront-ils sauvé eux aussi de leur folie à vouloir en percer les mystères? Habité par la foi ou le désir, l'homme doit franchir le pas car il sait qu'il retombera "du côté de chez soi.") Such a beautiful story.

See more comments on my ThrowbackThursday post in 2025.

From the back cover:

"From the author of the beloved best seller Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, a haunting tale of love and of the beguiling power of a lost language.

When Puyi, the last emperor, was exiled to Manchuria in the early 1930s, it is said that he carried an eight-hundred-year-old silk scroll inscribed with a lost sutra composed by the Buddha. Eventually the scroll would be sold illicitly to an eccentric French linguist named Paul d’Ampere, in a transaction that would land him in prison, where he would devote his life to studying the ineffably beautiful ancient language of the forgotten text.

Our unnamed narrator, a Western student in China in the 1970s, hears this story from the greengrocer Tumchooq - his name the same as that of the language in which the scroll is written - who has recently returned from three years of reeducation. She will come again and again to Tumchooq’s shop near the gates of the Forbidden City, drawn by the young man and his stories of an estranged father. But when d’Ampere is killed in prison, Tumchooq disappears, abandoning the narrator, now pregnant with his child. And it is she, going in search of her lost love, who will at last find the missing scroll and discover the truth of the Buddha’s lesson that begins “Once on a moonless night . . .” in this story that carries us across the breadth of China’s past, the myth and the reality."

Ghosh, Amitav "The Glass Palace"

Ghosh, Amitav "The Glass Palace" - 2000 

This was a great book club read, very popular with the members.

The story of Burma and its neighbours, so if you are a fan of India or Indian novels, this is also a book for you because it features quite a few Indian characters, as well. I love historic novels and this is one that's really worth reading. Of course, like all novels telling about history, there are a lot of sad sides to this book but it definitely is worth reading. It's worth writing down a "family tree" while reading, it helps remembering the connections between the characters - there are a lot.

We discussed this in our international book club in February 2005.

Amitav Ghosh is a promising new author for me. I read several of his books later, you can find the reviews here.

From the back cover:

"Set in Burma during the British invasion of 1885, this masterly novel by Amitav Ghosh tells the story of Rajkumar, a poor boy lifted on the tides of political and social chaos, who goes on to create an empire in the Burmese teak forest. When soldiers force the royal family out of the Glass Palace and into exile, Rajkumar befriends Dolly, a young woman in the court of the Burmese Queen, whose love will shape his life. He cannot forget her, and years later, as a rich man, he goes in search of her. The struggles that have made Burma, India, and Malaya the places they are today are illuminated in this wonderful novel by the writer Chitra Divakaruni calls 'a master storyteller.'"

See more comments on my ThrowbackThursday post in 2022.

Mason, Daniel "The Piano Tuner"

Mason, Daniel "The Piano Tuner" - 2002

Another book club read. Quite an interesting story, written by a young American author about colonialism, history, music, plants. If you like stories about this part of the world or set in a historical environment, you will enjoy this book.

In the late 19th century, a young piano tuner is sent to Burma to repair a rare piano. He leaves his wife in London and starts his travel through Europe, the Red Sea and India. He meets a lot of interesting people along the road until he arrives in the mysterious jungles of Burma.

I liked the description of the people, the scenery, the country, the culture, the politics, even the little stories inserted. I also liked the story itself, I just wasn't happy with the end because it left too many loose ends for my liking.

We had a great discussion because one of the members didn't like the book at all whereas the rest of us was quite pleased with it.

We liked it because
… it is about an area that little is written about and we thought his descriptive passages were very lucid and evoking, the language just sweeps you along .
… there is a lot of symbolism and talk about the belief of the Burmese people.
… of the description of the people, the scenery, the country, the culture, the politics, even little stories within the novel.
… the author introduced so many other subjects, all the details about tuning and music, we kept being surprised that it was written by a man, loved the personality of the main character, he was sensitive and gentle.
… there were really good descriptions of Burma and the passage, cultural differences and colonialism.
… the three different parts of the book portray three different parts of his life, ordinary life, looking forward to something new, changing his perspective in the end.

I still enjoyed reading this book because I became interested in this part of the world and its history after reading "The Glass Palace" by Amitav Ghosh.

There are talks about this being made into a movie. Should be interesting.

From the back cover:

"In 1886 a shy, middle-aged piano tuner named Edgar Drake receives an unusual commission from the British War Office: to travel to the remote jungles of northeast Burma and there repair a rare piano belonging to an eccentric army surgeon who has proven mysteriously indispensable to the imperial design. From this irresistible beginning, The Piano Tuner launches its protagonist into a world of seductive loveliness and nightmarish intrigue. And as he follows Drake’s journey, Mason dazzles readers with his erudition, moves them with his vibrantly rendered characters, and enmeshes them in the unbreakable spell of his storytelling."

We discussed this in our book club in December 2006.

See more comments on my ThrowbackThursday post in 2022.