Kim Echlin

The novel is, with compressed timelines, set in the period of the Cambodian genocide (1975-79), the Vietnamese occupation (1979-1989) and the “transition” under UN auspices to the first “democratic” elections in 1993. Anne Greves is sixteen when she falls in love with Serey, a Cambodian math tutor and singer in Montreal; Anne’s father, a widower, does not approve and is relieved when the Cambodian borders are re-opened and Serey returns home to try to find out what happened to his show more family during the Cambodian madness under Pol Pot. Anne hears nothing from Serey and then one day, ten years later, she thinks she sees him on a TV newscast; she settles up everything and flies to Phnom Penh where, against all odds, she finds him and they renew their love: “Longing for you, I learned…that once in a lifetime, if we are lucky, we meet the one who teaches us how even fickle Eros can set free abiding love.” Serey, unbeknownst to Anne, is involved in groups opposing the corruption and repression of the government, even the one supposedly moving towards democracy, and for this he one day disappears after a demonstration that has been violently disrupted by the police. Anne’s frantic, almost suicidal search for Serey leads her to the answer but also leads to her being forcibly ejected, and banned, from the country.

The “Disappeared” refers, immediately, to Serey, but it also refers to the millions of people who disappeared under the Khmer Rouge, people for whom there is no known resting place, people for whom any surviving relatives cannot properly mourn, people for whom there are no survivors and therefore no memory of their lives. This is a novel about loss: about the almost unbearable losses of a child and lover, losses that mark a life forever; about the loss of humanity in face of the unspeakable evil that people can do (“Compassion cannot be taught, but it can be eradicated”); about the loss of the innocence of childhood; about the loss of family; about the loss of traditions, especially those honouring ancestors who cannot be found; about the loss of trust in society and its concomitant growth of suspicion and paranoia; about the brutal, senseless, gratuitous loss of innocent lives and hopes. What can overcome this? Love. The love of another human being, love for humanity. But sometimes even this has to be exercised only within a very small area for fear of standing out and being lost.

And love can be a lonely place that marks a life:

“Now,…I see in the mirror a woman of certain age. I have filled in time since the day I lost you. A lifetime of silent pretending. If we live long enough, we have to tell, or turn to stone inside. I try to release you from a pit in my heart but unburied and unblessed you imprison me. I long for the brush of your fingers on my skin. I long for the light of your eyes. If I pray, I pray to a wounded god. In the end it is only the wounded who endure. In Cambodia they say, Loss will be god’s, victory will be the devil’s.”

This is a sobering, but not a depressing book. The writing is very simple, declarative sentences with the story told through Anne’s eyes. The simple style enhances the emotional impact of the lives of both Anne and Serey and challenges, frustrations, and dangers of living in Cambodia. Recommended reading. show less

10/10

Notes to self: to read, and read again.

I've lived this life, in many respects. And Echlin's got it right. All the details. All the nuances. All the sad, happy business of living under the visible life.

The places are exact. The music is authentic. I recognize all the characters -- in fact, I know many of them as players in my own life.

Katherine and Mahsa's friendship is the line that connects me to my best friends, for I have more-than-one Katherine-Mahsa friendship in my life, as show more many of us do, who live under the visible life.

The most radical thing a woman can do is live.

Live, as an active verb: neither as defiance, affront or provocation. But as celebration. As statement.

To hell with all those who doubt it. Where were you when it was all going down?

This is a deeply personal novel which will only hit its mark if you have known Katherine or Mahsa. Otherwise, it will just be white noise, and you shouldn't waste your time.

Some people will just never get it, and is not worth expending a breath to explain.

Some people will never know either Katherine or Mahsa -- and for this I mourn the poverty of their lives --no matter how many Instagram photos they post, to pretend otherwise; no matter how many self-help cult books they read to enrich that poverty.

One Katherine, one Mahsa is worth an infinity of instagram lives. show less

This is not a real review, perhaps, but my way to try and distil the amalgam of thoughts that assailed me after reading this novel, ... twenty years ago. I've never forgotten the feeling nor the image of that little elephant on the savannah.

I was moved by the beauty and simplicity of the prose: there is an elegance here that is larger than life, a great rumbling resonance echoes in the mind, much as elephants displace one's sense of reality by their very size. Everything is connected in show more such an elemental way: the mother dying of cancer; the captivity of this "all too solid flesh" which inhibits the freedom of spirit in both human and elephant; the death and birth cycle(s) of both human and elephant; the transmigration of thoughts between human and elephant.

But ... the resonance that so engaged me was as elusive as it was palpable: a paradox; a delightful tangential disturbance of the soul. We are connected in ways which are beyond all power of description. It is for this very reason, I suspect, that Echlin gives the elephants themselves a voice. In great detail, she reproduces their language, their rhythms; records both sound and meaning on the printed page, of the echoes she has heard ... elephant infra-sound she terms it.

There is also ironic pleasure in holding Echlin's book in one's hands: the book is half-size, a tiny gift in the hand. The dust jacket is subtle: on a khaki background (a wonderful connection to the savannahs in which elephants roam) a picture of an elephant is super-imposed. The elephant is moving toward the reader in a misty haze of blues and greys: is the elephant charging? ... or merely walking toward the reader? Is this a confrontation, or an offering?

From the first words, Batter My Heart, the title of the first chapter, one encounters the meaning of the novel. It will be both a confrontation and an offering. Echlin intends to open your heart. She weaves elusive magic intricately, subtly. There isn't even a hint of seduction, until, to take a breath, the reader looks up and realizes that 200 pages have drifted through one's consciousness; that one has been communing silently, all the hours of a long, sunny afternoon. One closes the book and re-enters a void, which for a few short hours, had been filled, wholly, completely with a sense of being connected to all things. Wordsworth comes to mind, in a flash of sunlight:

... And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man.
A motion and a spirit that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought
And rolls through all things ...

(Tintern Abbey, 1798)

Two hundred years later, Echlin picks up Wordsworth's song and refreshes our memory about the inter-connected beauty of all things. (As the noises have gotten louder in the intervening two centuries, we have drowned out the wisdom of our elemental selves.) I hope I never forget how I feel in this moment, and at the same time, hope that the ache in my heart will stop soon.

From the novel:

When I was in Africa, I went out with a ranger in a Land-Rover to look at the bones of an elephant killed by poachers two days earlier. Lions and vultures had already stripped the skeleton clean and as we approached we saw a small group of elephants scatter them, then spread dust over them with their trunks. After several hours, the group moved off leaving a small elephant about four or five years old, behind. The driver, no longer afraid, reached to his keys to turn on his engine, but I begged him to stay a little longer. And so we sat and watched. The small elephant mimicked her elders, smelling the bones, pushing them, trying to spread dust over them. The driver said softly, "Go back little one, there are lions."

It is eerie to see a small animal alone in the open in Africa. There are so many threats. I kept checking the bushes and the trees for hyenas and lions. I asked the ranger why the usually protective herd would let the little one stay alone, and he said, "They have to eat and drink. They don't have any choice."

"Why?"

"That little one won't go. She did this yesterday too. They came back for her at night. Perhaps tonight she'll give it up."

"But why does she keep staying?"

"The bones are her mother's."

"I wonder if I'll want to stay with my mother's bones when she's dead," I said.

"The ranger, a young man who had spent his life in the bush silently watching, answered drily, "I wonder, would you risk your life to do it." show less

When she learns that her mother is dying, Sophie Walker must give up her nomadic lifestyle and leave Zimbabwe to return to the family farm in southern Ontario. As she contemplates her life, she looks out her mother’s kitchen window, at the snowy winter landscape … and a herd of Asian elephants. The adjacent property is not a farm, but a small safari park. Sophie interprets a gesture from the elephants’ trainer, Jo Mann, as an invitation, and ventures onto the park grounds. Thus, begins show more her “elephant winter.”

This is really a character-based story, though there are some significant events, including a couple of violent altercations. Mostly, however, Echlin treats the reader to Sophie’s thoughts as she considers her mother’s condition, her role as daughter, lover, friend, her past and future. And she has conversations with her mother, a wildlife painter, on the importance of work, of finding your passion, of following your dream, of being a mother.

I really liked Echlin’s writing style. There was something so quiet and comforting about it. And still her imagery is very vivid. Some examples:
The light over those snowy Ontario fields was short and grey and bleak. We were just past winter solstice and though I’d been home some weeks, I still found it odd to look through the kitchen window and see the curious face of a giraffe above the snowy maple trees.

I listened to the creaking of the barnboard, to the breath of the elephants, to the cracking to frozen branches outside. I could feel the elephants rumbling … For as long as I could I lay listening to all the sounds of the barn and beyond.

I heard her loneliness rattling around like a pea in a dried-up pod.

Winter came twice that year. The earth had been wet and fragrant and then there was a spring snowstorm. Chickadees tucked themselves against frozen tree trunks and curled their heads under plumped-up wings.

The thin dawn taped itself like a piece of old and yellowing cellophane to the horizon and the cold adhered to my skin.

Echlin intersperses chapters from Sophie’s work on Elephant language throughout the book. There are studies on elephants and their communication methods, but this is, of course, total fiction; still, I found it just fascinating.

Note There are scenes where animals are injured or die. Readers who are sensitive to such scenes are forewarned. show less