Customer Reviews

The Disappeared

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3 star:		(4)
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1 star:		(3)

 

 

At heart a love story, The Disappeared is as well a paean to the Cambodian genocide (1975-79), in which two million people died, through the Vietnamese occupation (1979-89) and the United Nations Transitional Authority leading to a democratic election in 1993. The sad and tragic history of the Cambodian people is the backdrop of this novel, viewed through the lens of the love of a teenaged girl for a Cambodian musician a few years older that she first meets in her native Montreal. Anne Greaves is headstrong and motherless, resenting her father's vague attempts to control her once she has fallen hopelessly in love with the long-haired Serey with his magical fingers and beautiful face. Serey plays the music of the Khmer, exotic, thrilling, when paired with the more modern tunes of the seventies.

When the borders of Cambodia reopen for a short time, Serey must return to locate his family and the lovers are parted. Distraught, Anne waits for word, but hears nothing. After six years, convinced she has seen him on a television newsreel of Cambodia, Anne steps out of her life in Montreal and takes a flight to Phnom Penh, where she uses her facility with the Khmer language to begin her search. Both tragic and beautiful, this book is filled with the language of love and loss, the meeting of true soul mates and the damage of genocide on an entire population of innocents. Following her destiny, Anne never falters, as sure in her love for Serey as the first night she hears him play in the Montreal nightclub. Echlin embraces Cambodia with an open heart, witness to the beauty, ritual, tradition and tragedy of a place caught in the juggernaut of history. Reunited, the lovers refuse to be parted, even in death.

In prose that is as both elegiac and profoundly sad, the author writes with the timelessness of those without the boundaries of convention. While Cambodia is ground down by years of brutality and deceit, the people rise above the din of death, chanting in one voice for the disappeared. A painful story indeed, but one that must be told. Luan Gaines/2009.

The Disappeared" is a different kind of book than what I would normally select for myself. Now that I am finished reading the story, I'm uncertain if I'm pleased or disappointed for stepping out of my comfort zone. Set during the Cambodian genocide in the 1970's, "The Disappeared" follows the lives of two lovers-- Anne, a Canadian, and Serey, a Cambodian student.

There are a few things that I found off-putting about the novel. First of all, the author writes in a series of first person recollections. I found the flow of thoughts to read in a disjointed manner. I think this writing mechanism was supposed to represent the fragmentation of memories (and it did), but it also seemed melodramatic. Second of all, some phrases and conversations occured partially in untranslated French, and because of this I felt like I might be missing details in the story. But really, what bothered me the most was the portrayal of Anne and Serey's "love." I found myself wondering if what they had together could truly be defined as love. There was never a sense of the characters drawing strength or courage from each other. Anne makes sacrifices for Serey, but does he ever truly reciprocate? It seemed like their "love" made them secretive, anguished, reckless and even a bit self destructive. That is certainly not the kind of love that I aspire to.

Regardless, "The Disappeared" is a lovely story of survival, loss, sorrow and friendship. It paints a stark and honest picture of Cambodia and the struggles of its people. The secondary characters are intriguing and in many cases, more interesting than the primary characters. I thought "The Disappeared" was a good book, and a worthwhile read. But I don't recommend you place it at the top of your book list.

This book is not even so much about the story, which in itself is stunning, beautiful, harrowing; it's about language. It's about poetry. In this it reminds me much of Jeanette Winterson. Some moments:


I needed memory and hope and since I could find them nowhere else, I looked for them in the declension of verbs. Words swallowed me like a deep river.

I hear a voice cry out anguish. If this is a man? Human music turned into a note of music, the rhythm of a sentence. Men have invented a word for this. They call it sublime.

The Khmer Rouge used words to kill the people.

I think I began to read this way, studying the words in an open book, waiting for absence to be filled.


I was spellbound by "The Disappeared." Read it like a crazy person. Have ordered Echlin's other work. Breathtaking.

Read it and weep. Literally. The Disappeared is a quick, meaningful punch to the gut. In 228 short pages, author Kim Echlin wastes not a word or phrase in this despairing depiction of love and loss in war-torn Cambodia. Spanning decades and continents, from the dingy blues clubs of Montreal to the killing fields outside Phnom Penh, Anne Greves weaves a mournful path of despondency and courage as she follows her lover into the darkest recesses of human depravity.

Almost immediately upon opening this book, I knew I was going to enjoy it. Of course, "enjoy" is perhaps an inappropriate term given the subject. But a book's value is not measured in tidy narratives so much as in an ability to immerse its readers wholly into the world of its characters' lives. This holds true even when dialogue between characters is written intentionally dreamily, as if the protagonist's memory has decayed and dissolved over time, leaving only mystical moments where reality once breathed.

Strangely, I couldn't escape a familiar feeling for the first several chapters: the author's literary style reminded me of something else I'd read previously. Then it suddenly occurred to me: The English Patient. "The light in Mau's eyes was a pinprick through black paper," Echlin writes of Anne's first meeting with a new friend. "...I chose him because when he stepped forward, the others fell back...The light of his eyes twisted into mine." One entire chapter reads: "I can still see a particle of dust hanging in a sunbeam near your cheek as you slept." In very short order, it becomes all too clear that The Disappeared resembles Michael Ondaatje's masterpiece in little other than descriptive syntax, however. This is not dream-sequence-turned-real; it's a living nightmare, stretched and tortured into over thirty years of searching and loving and waiting and finding and searching all over again.

It is impossible not to empathize with Anne. Her naivete, her persistent belief in a justice, or karma, that will transform wrong into right, is as admirable as it is devastating. When she asks of her captor, "How can people move on without knowing what happens to their families? How can they move on without truth?" we want to laugh at her simplicity even as we cry for her faith in humanity. It is her ever-burning fire that ignites this story and affords us all the unique opportunity, if only for a moment, of believing again with her.

[...]

I could not put this book down. Kim Echlin has written a story of obsession, beauty, love, despair, and ultimately grief. This is a sensual story so beautifully written I felt that I knew Anne Greves and shuddered at the horror that took place in Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge regime. A must read!

I love this book very much. It is a kind of a very romantic love struggle between a Cambodian intellectual with a Canadian foreign student, before, during, and after the cruel regime of Khmer Rouge in which all Cambodian people suffered from in one way or another.

The author describes her love story very well in the book. She also relates very well about her personal life to the fact and social difficulties happening in Cambodia. I mostly agree with what the author mentions in the book.

I personally believe that if spirit does exist, the story of his wife's loving struggle in Cambodia would be heard and appreciated by the dead soul - her husband.

I would recommend this book to others, especially the lovers or couples between Cambodian people and other foreign nationalities.

Above all else this is a love story: about a young Canadian girl named Anne who falls hard & passionately for the exotic Cambodian musician Serey. But The Disappeared is also an exploration of the sadness in national scars inflicted by cruel governments, in this case the Khmer Rouge dictatorship upon Cambodia. Certainly the latter of these two elements is the most captivating.

I admit it: I don't care for the original Romeo & Juliet & I don't care for this romance much either. The affection between Anne & Serey isn't so much true love as it is rash, teenaged infatuation with stiff, lifeless chemistry. It is all passion, passion, passion; lacking the warmth & texture shared by true soul-mates. I would have enjoyed more quiet moments, more silly moments. Sometimes the most simple of conversations can hold the most depth.
The fact that Anne is so consumed by Serey also means we never see her with any dimension. Romance is all the characterization we get of our two lovers. They're icons, symbols, but hardly human.
I know it's a love story, I acknowledge that in my very first sentence, but it is just so syrupy & superficial, devoid of the soft, sweet nuances of genuine love. I just can't buy into it.

But by God the prose is exhilarating, poetic, filled with haunting grace, lush & beautiful like a waterfall. It sparkles like fire. It shimmers like pearl. & it rains down upon the wounded souls of Cambodia. The profound misery of their tragic situations whispers in the background, looming like fog, & make this a story worth my time.

This love story spans decades but rather than being a story of the love between a man and a woman it is more a tale of a woman's love for her man and his for his family and his country. The country in question is Cambodia and a great deal of the story takes place during the reign of the Khmer Rouge and the atrocities known as The Killing Fields.

The story begins when Anne Greves, a 16 year old Canadian schoolgirl who has recently lost her mother, falls in love with Serey, a 21 year old Cambodian man she meets at a Buddy Guy concert in Montreal. From there the story progresses into one woman's unwavering pursuit of the man she loves. This is a virtual Greek tragedy with the couple being separated, finding each other again a decade later, his disappearance (hence the books title), her compulsive search to find him and the hardships she endures in her journey. Metaphors abound in this book with Anne's loss of liberty and feelings of devastation mirrored in the destruction being inflicted by the Pol Pot regime on the people of Cambodia.

While the story itself is depressing Kim Echlin's writing possesses an exquisite beauty. She is a master of the mood and tone of her subject matter and fills her story with a panorama of vivid detail and observations. Lines like "Despair is an unwitnessed life" and "Could the world, like music, be borderless" are almost poetic in nature and this book could easily be categorized as an elegy.

Kim Echlin's third novel is a powerful story of passion, longing and unresolved grief. Echlin has evolved a distinctive writing style, elegant, lyrical and highly evocative, but the story suffers from structural flaws that made it ultimately unsatisfying for me. The author researched Cambodian history thoroughly and the book derives much strength from details and anecdotes drawn from her readings. Her descriptions of Cambodia and the Khmer people are vivid and faithful, as is her portrayal of the brutality and ruthlessness of the post-Pol Pot era.

But the story really focuses on the narrator's obsessive love for her Cambodian boyfriend Serey and her ceaseless efforts to find him when he vanishes, not once but twice. And although Echlin's contemplation of her anguish is explicit and beautifully drawn, it becomes excessive towards the end and the reader's sympathy starts to wane.

The book is perhaps more interesting as an exploration of the psychology of grief than as a novel, but I do think that Echlin is on the verge of writing truly great fiction. I will look for her work in the future.

This was a beautiful story of the power of love, the grief and indecency of loss, and the strength and potency of the human spirit to keep going amid dangerous and perilous conditions.

Anne Greves is a sixteen-year-old living in Montreal, Canada when she meets Serey, a Cambodian who is 5 years older than she is and a musician. Immediately they begin a passionate, sexual relationship. One day Serey decides to return to Cambodia to find his family whom he hasn't heard from in over a year. A daring decision on Serey's part as Cambodia was suffering in the aftermath of Pol Pot's savage revolution.

Ten years pass by and Anne has never heard from Serey and decides to go to Cambodia herself to find him. Unbelievably, Anne finds him and their reunion is as passionate as it was ten years ago.

Anne stays in Cambodia with Serey, becomes pregnant with his child and is excited and anxious waiting for the birth of their child. One day Anne is overcome with fever and rashes and is admitted to a local hospital. The doctor examines her and finds out she has dengue fever. What about their baby?

Suddenly Serey disappears and Anne hires a taxi driver she has come to know, Mau, to drive her to another city named Ang Tasom where she suspects Serey to be. What does Anne discover?

A haunting novel that will stay with you long after the last page has been turned.