The Language of Solitude by Jan-Philipp Sendker

Published by Atria / 37 INK on May 2, 2017

Two intertwined stories are told in The Language of Solitude. One is political and the other is not. Both are romantic but in different ways.

In its setting, mood, and emphasis on romance, The Language of Solitude is similar to Jan-Philipp Sendker’s popular The Art of Hearing Heartbeats. I think the political story in The Lanuage of Solitude is more successful than the straightforward romance in the nonpolitical story. The romance in the political  story struck me as being deeper and more meaningful, and its depiction of oppression and corruption in China stand as a lesson about the need for vigilance in maintaining an open and ethical government in the United States.

As in The Art of Hearing Heartbeats, The Language of Solitude is set in Hong Kong and the main character is an idealized male who suffers deeply yet opens himself to love. Paul Leibovitz lives in relative isolation on the island of Lamma. He lost his son and, at 53, is afraid to father another. Before she boards a ferry to a neighboring island, his current lover, Christine, tells Paul that he is hungry for love. That may be Paul’s defining characteristic, although Sendker makes clear that Paul is also compassionate, sensitive, empathic, perfectly attuned to his lover’s needs and moods, and full of emotional depth (in short, the kind of men who are easier to find in fiction than in the real world).

Paul has learned to distrust the illusion of the future, to be suspicious of happiness, to take nothing for granted. Christine Wu, on the other hand, is a dreamer, a woman who places her trust in fate. Christine wonders if Paul is living on the island of Lamma to place himself in exile, but Paul is remarkably dependent on others for someone who has gone into exile. If he doesn’t hear from Christine for a couple of days, he drives himself mad worrying that their relationship is imperiled. So, Paul is ideal but also annoyingly needy, although some readers may find that neediness appealing if it taken as a sign of his love for Christine.

In fact, the relationship is imperiled because, having received unwelcome news of the future from an astrologer, Christine is afraid of the relationship, for Paul’s sake. To placate Christine, Paul also visits the astrologer, and some of the nonpolitical love story is driven by the astrologer’s forecast of his future.

The political story begins when Christine’s brother, Da Long, after being absent and presumed dead during Christine’s lifetime, suddenly resurfaces with a mysterious request. That situation takes Paul and Christine to mainland China where Christine learns the surprising reason why she was summoned to the place of her birth after so many years.

Da Long’s story, which involves his romance with Min Fang during the Cultural Revolution, is more interesting than that of Paul and Christine, if only because it is steeped in a dramatic history. Paul eventually pursues the cause of Min Fang’s current illness, creating conflict with her son, Xiao Hu, and her daughter, Yin-Yin. The conflict illuminates cultural differences between traditional Chinese (who tend to accept things as fate if they feel powerless to change them) and westerners (who often look for ways to change things they do not want to accept).

“A loving heart never gives up” says a character in The Language of Solitude. The story advances that the theme, as well as the need for, and difficulty of achieving, reconciliation and forgiveness. The political themes have to do with the corruption that follows when a  government and businesses become too chummy, the false reliance on “national security” to cover up wrongdoing, the importance of environmental regulations, and the power of the internet.

I thought some of the romantic scenes involving Paul and Christine were a bit sappy. I recognize that some readers will take that as a warning and others will deem it a reason to read the book.

While the other characters all seem credible, I had trouble accepting Paul as a real person. For someone who has lived in or near China for 30 years, Paul is remarkably ignorant of Mainland China’s repressive politics and corrupt government. Or perhaps he’s unreasonably optimistic, which seems inconsistent with everything we learn about him. Maybe he needs to be ignorant to advance the story, but his naivete is not well explained.

The novel’s ending is a bit forced, perhaps to make it fit within an astrologer’s prediction about Paul’s future in a way that will not displease readers. Of course, people who believe in fortune telling are always forcing random events to fit their interpretations of a prediction, but I think the use of astrology in the novel, no matter how important it is in Chinese culture, could have been handled with more subtlety.

On balance, I liked the political story and the romance involving Da Long and his wife. I was less interested in Paul and his romance with Christine. As always, I admired Sendker’s graceful prose. The Language of Solitude is worth a reader’s time, but like other Sendker novels, only parts of this one left me feeling satisfied.

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Whispering Shadows by Jan-Philipp Sendker

First published in German in 2007; published in translation by Atria on April 14, 2015

I liked The Art of Hearing Heartbeats, although I had reservations about the novel's late stages. Readers who loved that 2002  novel will probably like Jan-Philipp Sendker's 2007 novel less. While both books explore the intersection of the East and West, The Art of Hearing Heartbeats is fundamentally a love story. Whispering Shadows is more a novel of international intrigue, although a love story lurks within its pages. I think Whispering Shadows is a superior novel, but readers looking for another Art of Hearing Heartbeats might be disappointed.

Paul Leibovitz is the son of a Jewish father and a German mother, but only in Asia does he feel at home. The death of his son in Hong Kong turns Paul into a hermit. Three years after that death, Paul, now divorced, has an ambiguous interest in a woman named Christine but he resists the notion of having a girlfriend or, for that matter, a life. He prefers to brood for fear that moving on will cause him to lose his memories of his son.

On a rare trip from his home on Lamma Island to the island of Hong Kong, Paul meets Elizabeth Owen. Paul has little interest in her problems but when she tells him that her adult son has disappeared in China, he agrees to contact a friend named Zhang in the Shenzhen police who might be able to help. Christine, who has a deep distrust of Chinese officials based on a family tragedy, urges Paul not to become involved. The discovery of a violent death in Shenzhen sucks Paul into a quagmire. He doesn't want to get involved, but destiny or karma intercedes when Zhang asks for his help ... or perhaps Paul realizes that the time has come to start making choices.

Eventually the novel shifts to the perspectives of other characters. One is Victor Tang, a Chinese entrepreneur who has benefitted from the intersection of criminality and capitalism. Another is Richard Owen, who objected on grounds of patriotism to his son's plan to close the family's manufacturing plant in Wisconsin in favor of manufacturing in China. The final primary character is Zhang. He is a familiar character in fiction, the honest cop who opposes corruption, although as a Buddhist in China he doesn't fit the "cop novel" stereotype.

All of the characters are realistic, in part because their behavior is often less than ideal. To a degree, they are all selfish and self-absorbed. For good reason, Zhang is fearful to the point of paralysis. Having rejected the childhood lies his country told him about the benefits of shared sacrifice, Tang craves power. Richard is jealous of his son. Christine is controlling while Paul has walled himself off from emotion and human contact. They are all wrestling with their pasts and, in the case of the Chinese characters, with the impact of Mao's China on their pasts. Part of the novel's intrigue comes from wondering whether the characters will overcome those issues.

America's progression from Buy American to Fire Americans, and the notion that the American Dream is now (in altered form) the Chinese Dream, are among the novel's most interesting themes. Another important theme is the inability of people who grow up in a free nation to understand how oppression and the hunger for freedom shapes behavior. Still another is whether truth exists as an objective fact or whether truth is what people with power decide it should be. The cousin of truth is trust. Can we trust those who conceal the truth? Does the answer depend on the reason for hiding the truth? Finally, the novel explores the theme of bravery. Doing the right in the face of risk is an act of bravery, but is it also an act of stupidity if it will destroy your life without preventing evil from being done?

As he did in The Art of Hearing Heartbeats, Jan-Philipp Sendker writes of passion with honesty and intensity, from physical and emotional perspectives. He gives key characters a variety of interesting conflicts. Whispering Shadows fails to generate much suspense and the plot did not grab me on an emotional level, but the interaction of the characters creates dramatic tension. The story moves forward at a comfortable pace and reaches a satisfying conclusion.

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The Art of Hearing Heartbeats by Jan-Philipp Sendker

First published in German in 2002; first published in translation in 2006; published by Other Press on January 31, 2012

The first third of The Art of Hearing Heartbeats is enthralling.  The remainder of the novel is problematic; it sustained my interest but not my enthusiasm.

After telling her that he was leaving for an appointment in Boston, Julia Win’s father takes a flight to Thailand and disappears.  The Times described him as “an influential Wall Street lawyer” but the police suspect he had a hidden past.  Burmese by birth, Tin Win became an American citizen in 1959.  Julia, a recent law school graduate, viewed her father as staid, reliable, out-of-date -- not the sort of person whose life is filled with mystery or who takes an unannounced trip to Thailand.  Four years after his disappearance, Julia finds a letter he wrote to a woman named Mi Mi.  Julia travels to Kalaw, determined to find Mi Mi, the only clue to her father’s past.  There she meets U Ba, who has been waiting to tell her the story Tin Win told him, a story from which “a life emerged, revealing its power and its magic.”

Just as we’re settling into Julia’s quest, the story shifts to the one told by U Ba.  It starts with Mya Mya, a young Burmese woman who regards the birth of Tin Win as a calamity.  An astrologer’s prediction that he will lose his sight is soon fulfilled.  After his parents die, Tin is taken to a monastery.  It is there that he first meets Mi Mi -- or, more precisely, that he first hears her heartbeat.  Mi Mi was born with “crippled feet”; their disabilities draw Tin and Mi Mi together.

Hearts and heartbeats are frequent images in the novel.  Jan-Philipp Sendker also makes good use of the imagery of balance:  Mi Mi, for instance, is emotionally well balanced even though she is incapable of balancing on her misshapen feet.  Tin balances his blindness with exceptional hearing.  Mi Mi and Tin balance each other:  when Tin carries Mi Mi on his back, her eyes provide their twinned vision, his feet set them in unitary motion.  Julia, despite having all the advantages of a stable, upper class family and western education, finds that she needs to bring her life into balance:   understanding her father becomes a necessary condition of understanding herself.

As related by U Ba, Tin Win’s tale is a love story that too often shares the characteristics of a well written fairy-tale.  There are times when the descriptions of Mi Mi’s blossoming love are a little too obvious, too melodramatic, too much like Barry Manilow with punchier prose.  Moreover, the description of their developing love creates a dull lull in the story arc.  After Tin leaves Mi Mi to meet his uncle in Rangoon the novel regains some of its force, particularly after it circles back to Julia and her uncertainty about her father’s love (understandable given his abandonment of her).  At that point a different and more original love story emerges, one that addresses a child’s love for a parent.  U Ba sums it up:  “Love has so many different faces that our imagination is not prepared to see them all.”

As the novel winds down, we learn the rest of Tin’s story.  It comes to a predictable finish but (despite its greater length) it seems less important than Julia’s.  To the extent that Tin’s story is about the purity of devotion shared by two separated lovers, I tend to agree with one of the characters who observes that love is a form of madness and hopes it isn’t contagious.  And as much as I would like to believe in the strength of heart displayed by Tin and (especially) Mi Mi, I found it incongruous that Tin couldn’t give the same unconditional love to his daughter, and I was disappointed that Sendker didn’t address that incongruity in greater depth.

It’s difficult to introduce an element of mysticism in a book that isn’t wholly a fantasy.  The best writers (Haruki Murakami comes to mind) manage to convince the reader that the mystical is real.  That Sendker doesn’t quite pull it off is my largest reservation about The Art of Hearing Heartbeats.  Its fine prose and entertaining moments nonetheless make the novel worth reading, and an unanticipated twist at the end pays a rewarding dividend.

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