Where My Heart Used to Beat: A Novel

As you read WHERE MY HEART USED TO BEAT, you may wonder, where is this going.If you were to ask me, I'd say, no place interesting. Although Sebastian Faulks must have a point to this story, he's so slow in making it that he lost me.

This story is several stories within a story as the main character

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remembers episodes from his past, beginning with his boyhood, to his days as a student, to his World War II experiences, to his love life. Sometimes the stories alternate. They are slow.

I asked for and won this book from librarything.com. I wanted to try Faulks, a new author for me. I'm sorry because someone else who wanted this book didn't win because I did.

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Where My Heart Used to Beat is the story of Robert Hendricks, a war-damaged English psychiatrist who receives a request from an elderly stranger living in a remote island in the Mediterranean. The elderly man, a neurologist named Alexander Pereiera, served with Hendricks' father in WWI and has some

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information about him that may be of interest to Hendricks. Since Hendricks' father died while Robert was a child, this is an opportunity to find out more about the man he never knew. Pereiera also states that he would like Hendricks to be his literary executor. These are intriguing reasons for Hendricks to visit Perriera, which he does with an outcome that is surprising to him.

Through the course of their conversations, Hendricks reveals details about his military service that have irrevocably altered the course of his thinking about the fundamental nature of man and the atrocities perpetrated in the 20th century. During the course of his military service, he falls in love with a woman. This relationship and its precipitous conclusion add another layer of cynicism to his way of viewing the world.

There are intriguing aspects of this book that are never fully explored. Sebastian Faulks writes very well; the descriptions of Hendricks' war experiences are harrowing in their details. The parts that delve into his psychiatric practice and conclusions were not as engrossing as they could have been. Somehow I just never connected with the character of Robert Hendricks in any memorable way.

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It takes a lot for me to start a book, but not finish it. Unfortunately, I found this book so dry, so pretentious, so boring, that I got 117 pages into and could go no further.

I didn't like the main character, and I was bored by his recollections of his time as a soldier in WW II. I usually enjoy

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novels set during this time period, but this one was just not for me.

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Unfortunately after a good effort, I found Where My Heart Used to Beat rather long winded and uninteresting. I appreciate the opportunity to receive the book for consideration, however, I just couldn't continue.

I loved Birdsong and wanted to like this novel, but found it very slow to keep reading. The story centers around Robert Hendricks, a psychiatrist in his 60s, who is invited by another psychiatrist who knew his father to come for a visit. There, he starts reflecting on his life, especially about his

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war years during WWII and a women he met in Italy. The book was disappointing to me.

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Robert Hendricks is a sad man, rattled by his memories of war and lost love. Through his connection with an elderly neurologist, Robert revisits the ghosts of his past and his relationships with war buddies, a beautiful Italian woman, and the father that he never knew. There are some thoughtful

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sentiments on solitude and memory, but Robert is not the most compelling of narrators and it was sometimes a challenge to stay with him as he worked through his past. His mental health and the reliability of his own memory is briefly questioned, although not thoroughly explored.

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I won't be reading this book, not for me. First chapter is a depressing encounter with a call girl. Content is not what I want to read.

*I received this book through LibraryThing Early Reviewers.*

A very psychological novel, which is very fitting as the two central characters are psychologists. Opening in 1980, much of the book consists of flash packs to the narrator's experiences in the Second World War, where he served in North

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Africa and Italy. The psychological toll of war, violence, and love are nearly always present in this novel, making it for somewhat heavy reading for a novel. Overall, a good read, but somewhat hard to get through at times.

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I received this book here as an Early Reviewer. I don't believe I have come across Faulks in the past, but I will be looking him up. My rating is a little less than the full 4, more like a 3.75. Looking at other reviews, it appears that those familiar with his previous works don't find this to be

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one of his stronger efforts. It is easy reading, but please don't make the mistake of reading it too quickly because I think it will undermine your appreciation of the introspective and speculative sections, of which there are many.

This book is particularly appealing for readers who are interested in the history of mental illness - it is as much about that as it is about WWII. For me, it was really about the mental illness, nothing occurred really in the war portions that was especially unique, nor with the love story. It was some time before I really knew where it was going to be honest, but it didn't bother me. Some of the things that happened in his life in the present day were a bit unsettling and did not seem to mesh well with the rest of the novel, but others may not find it so.

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I received an ARC of this book in exchange for a fair and honest review.

I don't think I've ever taken so long to read an ARC before. I wanted to like this book, I really did. I just didn't.
I found Robert, the main character, uninteresting and slightly off-putting. The entire novel fell very

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detached, which I suppose was on purpose. Robert seems to go through his life aloof and completely uninvolved from everything around him. I think the author did this a little too well. I felt little to no connection to Robert and it made the novel very easy to put down and forget from chapter to chapter. It was the kind of book that you force yourself to finish, hoping it will get better or that some revelation down the road will finally make sense of the senseless.
I did however, love the way it was written. The style was simple yet still managed to evoke great imagery.
So, while this novel wasn't really my cup of tea, I'd gladly check out Faulks' earlier novels. Perhaps I'll have better luck!

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I've tried to get into this book since early December, but I think I'm going to admit defeat: I just don't want to finish this book. There are lots of reasons. I don't care for the main character and I find the plot uninteresting. It's probably just me, but this book is not my cup of tea.

I have long considered Sebastian Faulks to be the go-to author when it comes to fiction delving into the mindset of soldiers faced with the trench warfare experience of World Wars I and II. His most successful, and I think his most compelling, books, The Girl at the Lion d’Or, Birdsong, and

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Charlotte Gray have all focused on the war experience of soldiers and civilians.

Where My Heart Used to Beat does cover more of that ground, but does it from the perspective of a World War II veteran looking backward from present day 1980. Via this look-back, Faulks shows precisely the war’s effect on the book’s main character, Robert Hendricks, a man very much shaped by his war experiences – whether or not he wants to admit it to himself. Now a successful London psychiatrist with a respected book in the field to his credit, Hendricks lives a solitary life on his own. He is a man with few friends, none of them close ones, who seldom thinks about his past.

That all changes – rather drastically – when Hendricks receives a letter from a tiny island off the coast of France from Dr. Alexander Pereira, an elderly neurologist who commanded Hendricks’s father in the trenches of World War I. Hendricks reluctantly agrees to visit the old man in his island home in order to hear what the retired doctor can tell him about his father, who never came home from that war. But as it turns out, Dr. Pereira has much more than that in mind. Through long, detailed conversations between the men, in which Dr. Pereira often assumes the role of therapist and Hendricks the role of patient, we learn of Hendricks’s wartime experiences and how they so uncannily parallel those of his father’s one generation earlier.

Much of Where My Heart Used to Beat takes place in present day 1980 where the reader witnesses the rather aimless existence of Robert Hendricks, now in his mid-sixties and near the end of his professional career. The ordinariness and somberness of Hendricks’s lifestyle in the present pale in comparison to what he experienced as a young man, making his accounts of the war to Dr. Pereira even more compelling than they would have been on their own. This is very much a book about warfare and its effect on those who survive it.

Where My Heart Used to Beat is filled with characters – perhaps too many characters, because even some of the most interesting of them seem to disappear almost as soon as they pass through Hendricks’s world. Faulks seems to be reminding the reader that such is life, that people come and go at such a pace that even the interesting ones manage to escape us rather easily. In contrast, the book’s three main characters (Hendricks, Pereira, and the young Italian woman Hendricks meets during the war) will leave readers with much to ponder long after the novel has been read. Where My Heart Used to Beat is a complicated, introspective novel that will enhance Faulk’s already solid reputation as one of the finest historical fiction writers of his generation.

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The search for w h at is mwant by sanity and how the mind works is a recurring motif. Through the main character, Dr Robert Hendricks, telling his story to Alexander Pereira, his host on an island off the coast of France, we journey with him on his quest to rationalise his life. We read of his

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childhood, his experiences in Italy during WW2 and his love of Louisa. A profoundly moving story.

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Dr Robert Hendricks never knew his father as he died in WWI. Hendricks himself has his own demons from WWII. When he gets letter from someone who is a fan of his professionally and served with his father Hendricks finds himself looking back at his life. This book was slow at times and interesting

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at others. However it never really went anywhere. The main character eventually gets answers and finds some peace but as a reader I was never as invested as a reader as I felt I should have.

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I very rarely do not finish a book that I have promised to review, but unfortunately I am not interested in finishing this one. I find the main character obnoxious and odious and I just plain don't like him. The beginning was particularly repulsive and turned me off right away. I did give it

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several more tries but even though this book is about a subject (WWII) I am interested in it is just too dry and dull for my taste. Just not my thing.

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a nice story about a man entering the last stage of his life. he is still active and healthy and produce but he sees the end. A lot of discussion about memory, war, family, and love. i liked it a lot

I received this book as part of LibraryThing's Early Reviewers program.

I generally love historical fiction, though I really love when it focuses on times and places that haven't been covered a thousand times before. As this deals with WWII Europe, it didn't feel fresh and unique. It's a

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well-written story, but I don't think it ever came to its point. I never fully comprehended what Perreira was trying to do with Hendricks, or his true opinion on him. And the story with Luisa felt extremely anticlimactic. Even the truth about Hendricks' father was not terribly surprising. It seems unlikely that I'll think back on this book again.

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I've read most of Faulks' other books, but I found this one more difficult to get into. It has a lot to say about the disillusionment of those who started the 20th century with optimism, and then saw their high hopes gradually eroded by the worst men could do to each other in war. That sense of

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melancholy pervades the book, particularly in the main character, who agonises over a life he feels has been unfulfilled, and lacking in anything really worthwhile. The visit to his dying mother though, is masterly in its observation, as is his summary of Paris in Chapter 11. There are many overlaps with Faulks' book 'Human Traces' in terns of psychiatric thought, research and practice.

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Sebastian Faulks's best known book, "Birdsong," published in 1993, is billed as “a novel of love and war.” It is indeed a brilliant and devastating portrayal of the horrors of trench warfare in France during World War I. But its love story is tedious and banal. Which novelist would show up in

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Faulks's most recent novel – the superb war novelist or the uninspired romantic? Neither. There is a war story in "Where My Heart Used to Beat" and there is a love story but the former isn't brilliant and the latter is as trite and uninteresting as the earlier effort.

Robert Hendricks is a sixty-ish British psychiatrist whose father died in World War I when Robert was a child and whose own war years were the defining chapter of his life. Robert has never married and engages in fleeting relationships that do nothing do relieve his loneliness. Into this solitary life drops the plot device that sets the novel in motion – a mysterious letter from a doctor who knew Robert's father during the war and who has a proposal to offer Robert. Soon we're on a beautiful rocky island off the coast of France and jumping back and forth in time as Robert recounts and relives his war trauma, the love affair that has haunted him for forty years, and his professional efforts to develop a humane and effective way to treat schizophrenia.

But nothing in this novel seems to hang together or is very compelling and the whole doesn't have much of a point. I get it...war inflicts lasting trauma on those who fight it, suppressed memories gnaw at the soul, longing for a lost love is a recipe for loneliness. But two-thirds through I still didn't know where it was going and having finished it, I wasn't sure that the journey was worth taking.

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A poignant novel that gradually reveals the life of Robert Hendricks, a psychotherapist, as he struggles to come to terms and understand his own life and to also reconcile his feelings for his father who died when he was only two years old.
It is also a revealing meditation on the nature of

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otherness or what might be called insanity in others, as Hendricks devotes his career to try to heal his patients and persuade others that his methods are an advance on those already being practised.
During these researches he is contacted by a French doctor, Alexander Pereira, who knew his father in the First World War and who has also followed a career in psychotherapy. Pereira gradually reveals information about Hendricks’ father that has parallels to the son’s life and acts as an analyst to him.
As well as being a wonderfully readable book, the deft writing evokes great sympathy for Hendricks’ dilemma.

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The book was an uneven read for me, but ultimately a good one. The writing was beautiful but the format was hard to follow with the narrator jumping back and forth between different years where he compared his experiences with the travesty of war against the few weeks of intense love he felt for

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Luisa. He wrote of his despair for the human race against his realization of beauty and connectedness when friends reached out to him with compassion. Faulks was at his best describing the horror of his war exper4iences and describing the closeness he felt to those around him experiencing the same brutal conditions. His love for Luisa was not as affecting as it felt he distanced himself from these emotions.

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I’ve read each of Faulks’s novels as they’ve hit paperback, and I’ve never really worked out why I fastened onto him as a modern author to read. I think he’s much better than McEwan, who managed a couple of stonkers early in his career, but then Faulks’s career has never really matched

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Birdsong… although I thought the story of Human Traces danced about a pretty interesting idea… And that same idea sort of crops up in Where My Heart Used to Beat. Faulks has… odd ideas about consciousness, and the historical origin of human awareness. In a science fiction writer, they’d be understandable, if not even defensible. But Faulks writes lit fic. In Where My Heart Used to Beat, which is set in the 1980s, a UK doctor is invited to a small French island to meet a famous neurologist at the end of his life and career. The neurologist wants the doctor to be his literary executor, partly because he commanded his father during WWI and holds a secret about that, and partly because the doctor’s career hints that he might be receptible to the neurologist’s Big Idea. The narrative dips in and out of the doctor’s life, mostly focusing on WWII, when he was involved in the Allied invasion of Italy. During that time, he met a young Italian woman and weas convinced she was the love of his life; but she turned out to be married, and he never really recovered. And it’s the concept of love, and Faulks’s previously trotted-out theory on inter-brain communication, that provides the substrate for Where My Heart Used to Beat. It’s a very readable novel – Faulks’s prose is never less than readable – and a more coherent one that his last couple… but it doesn’t have the… weight of Human Traces, and so its central premise dosn’t in the slightest convince. Faulks produces polished middle-brow material, and he does it well, much better than McEwan – but every time I read one of his novels I find myself wondering why I continue to read him. I still don’t know.

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A psychiatrist in his sixties, lonely and single, defined by the losses of his youth – his father in the great war when he was just a baby, his comrades in arms who didn’t come home from the second war, and the woman he fell in love with when he was a soldier, Dr. Robert Hendricks is invited to

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be the literary executor of an older doctor, a neurologist, who fought in WWI and has memories of Robert’s father during that time.

Character-driven, though by unlikeable characters, [Where My Heart Used to Beat] examines love, memories, and mental illness, which parts of the novel I found interesting. Recommended to readers who enjoy novels about the psychology of experience, but a bit too much of the unlikeable and dark for me.

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A beautifully written five star novel, interweaving both World Wars of the 20th century with the latter half of that century this is a novel of loss, of change, of grappling with what should have been but never was. The great existentialist questions of life, death, meaning and truth are like

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threads woven into the writing.
Writing which is evocative of someone searching for meaning, searching for what he dare not search for. And as the novel develops we are taken from place to place, from time to time almost seamlessly as the central character grapples with his past, his present and his very being.
Faulks explores the mindset of trench soldiers alongside a search for justice for those suffering from mental health and in so doing places the story back into the second half of the 20th century, projecting it into our time with themes of loss and love. This novel will continue to resonate in my soul as I place it back on the shelves.

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