By following the attenuation of moral responsibility that political leaders depend on, Yapa demonstrates the grotesque process that encourages otherwise good, reasonable people to perfect methods of maiming and blinding peaceful protesters.
...the novel’s indisputably good heart is weakened by a tendency toward overwriting and the conventionality of its narrative moves ... Yapa’s instinct is to dramatize the answers, to create around them a machinery of narrative buildup — back story, slow reveal, pathos and suspense — that seems too streamlined for the mass of human contradiction on which it’s built.
You have to give Yapa credit for his ambition, and it's obvious that he's a writer of great compassion. The concept behind Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist is a good one, but the execution is, at best, amateurish.
Where Yapa succeeds is in evoking the interconnectedness that the antiglobalisation movement both responded to and attempted to transcend ... The question of what makes violence legitimate runs through the novel, but the novel is also in love with violence. The means overwhelm the ends.
Firsthand observers (and participants) of the real 1999 battle in Seattle may wince at some of the book’s creative liberties, particularly vis a vis public figures like Stamper and Schell. But Yapa’s melding of fact and fiction, human frailty and geopolitics, is a genuine tour-de-force, and an exciting literary debut.
Characters exist to flesh out the competing interests of those involved in the violence, so that the attempt to make conflicting points of view easy to understand results in a lack of emotional engagement with these characters because they are clearly just stand-ins for a particular ideology.
If you can tame your cynicism about the characters, it’s a propulsive street-level view of what happened—and, in my earnest, emo opinion, a beautifully written book.
Yapa finesses the tricky work of alternately conveying panoramic crowd views and focusing on individuals that reminded me of Don DeLillo’s technique. The key difference is that in DeLillo’s fiction, crowds are often cold entities, and in Yapa’s world they are warm, the sum of thousands of beating hearts.
...demonstrates the great advantage that fiction has over journalism: the freedom to establish the facts, after the fact, and to set them in a context deepened by hindsight.... [a] remarkable, engrossing novel.
Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist goes long on theme and language while coming up short on story and characterization, but Sunil Yapa's voice and ambition leap off the page.
Marred only slightly by uneven character development, this furiously paced and contrapuntal literary tour-de-force makes use of multiple vantage points and benefits from a remarkably empathic sensibility on the part of its author.
Yapa does a heroic job of journeying into the heart of this complex set of events, illustrating how they grow out of and impact the character’s lives. And while the heart may be the size of a fist, here it paradoxically seems to encompass the whole world and all of its citizens, who pulse with its every beat.
What’s so remarkable about this novel is that even in the midst of navigating two levels of drama — interpersonal and situational — Yapa also keeps his pen trained on the moral issue at stake.
