
The Disappeared
Kim Echlin
December 2009
235 pages
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Yet another FTC disclosure: Yet another purchase. And one I will never regret.
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Publisher Comments:
A searing, fiercely beautiful love story for the ages, The Disappeared — already a best seller in Canada — traces one woman’s three-decades-long journey from the peaceful streets of Montreal to the humid, war-torn villages of Cambodia, as a brief love affair turns into a grand passion of loss, mourning, and remembrance, set against one of the most brutal genocides of the twentieth century.
When sixteen-year-old Anne Greves first meets Serey, a Cambodian student and musician forced by his family to leave his country during the rise of the Khmer Rouge regime, she never considers the consequences of their complicated romance. Swept up in the fury and infatuation of young love, Anne rebels against her father’s wishes and embraces her relationship with Serey in the smoky jazz clubs of Montreal and in his cramped yellow bedroom. But when the borders of Cambodia are reopened, Serey must risk his life to return home, alone, in search of his family.
A decade later, Anne will travel halfway around the world to find him, and to save their love from the same tragic forces that first brought them together. Written in tenacious, achingly tender prose, The Disappeared challenges our notions of how to both claim the past and move on after those we love vanish.
Part elegy, part love letter, part call to arms, this courageous novel is a soaring tribute to all those who have disappeared in the violent conflicts throughout history.
If you think this description sounds over the top, well, it’s not. This book is absolutely haunting. It’s both beautifully written and heartbreaking. And I’m not the only one who thinks so…My Friend Amy loved it, as well. I honestly cannot say enough about the writing. It’s so evocative and touching, and I’m not one to normally notice these things.
The book is written from Anne’s perspective, and it reads like a love letter to Serey.
You keep coming back to me in little bits of moving images, light on a winter wall. Come to the door, spirit I know, and I will stand and hold you. Come alive just one more time, let me feel your breath, Serey, let me hear your voice in song, let me wash away the pain. Come, and I will whisper your name to you one more time.
As Anne reflects back, she recounts the story of their love. But she also tells the story of Cambodia, its people, its culture and its history. And she talks of genocide.
The Khmer Rouge used words to kill the people. Touk chom nenh dork chenh kor min kat. Sam at kmang. They said these things over and over, To keep you is no benefit, to lose you is no loss. Cleanse the enemy.
These were phrases I had never studied.
And finally, Anne and Serey’s story is a tribute to both love and genocide. Not two things that normally go together, but Anne’s love for Serey will not die, and she refuses to let Serey and his life go unremembered. Thus, his story becomes the story of all victims of genocide, the disappeared of the title.
I do not understand the unfathomable love I feel for you. But I am in the place the old Gnostics call emptiness. If your face appeared around the doorway where I sit at his small desk, I would turn to you and say, Now I am awake.
The strangeness of my love for you is that it has made me dead in life and you alive in death. I am afraid you will disappear and no one will remember your name.
Please, read this book. It will break your heart, but you’ll forgive it because of the beauty of the writing and the things it makes you think.























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