Kim Echlin

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

Summary: Anne Greves is a sixteen-year-old girl in Montreal when she meets Serey, a student from Cambodia who cannot return to his country because of the genocide. They fall in love, but when Cambodia’s borders reopen Serey goes back to find his family. When Anne doesn’t hear from him, she decides to go after him, and so begins her saga of violence and loss in wartorn Cambodia.

Review: This is the second book in my goal to read the entire Giller 2009 shortlist. I read this after The show more Winter Vault and I can’t help but notice the similarities. Both are about a couple who experience separation and loss, both have stillborn babies, both are told in a fragmentary and poetic style, and both involve ventures into foreign countries. However, whereas I merely liked The Winter Vault, I loved The Disappeared. I think for me the political turmoil and brutality of the Cambodian setting made the difference. In The Winter Vault it was mostly just two privileged middle-class people having existential angst. But here is the kind of loss that moves me more deeply, the loss of friends and family and country.

The Disappeared is short but absolutely heartbreaking. Anne’s love for Serey shines through the pages so desperately, and you want them to be together, but you know that Serey’s involvement in the resistance makes it impossible. There’s a sense of despair, a sense of ‘you can’t change anything about this’ whereas in The Winter Vault I always felt that the protagonists could get over their angst; they just choose not to.

The pain, the fear, the disappearance of thousands of Cambodians. The question of how to continue loving someone even after they are gone. Echlin’s prose is simple but she knows how to choose the words that will punch you the hardest. I know I will want to read more about modern Cambodia after this (not that I wasn’t interested before, because I was, but my interest has been re-fanned, so to speak). It also makes me excited to read the other books on the Giller shortlist, especially the book that won, because if it beat this one, it must be pretty goddamn stellar.

Conclusion: Heartbreak in 228 pages.

P.S: Apologies for the excessive comparison with The Winter Vault. Reading them back to back sort of messed with my head a bit, haha. 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

The Disappeared takes some time to get into but proves rewarding by the end offering tidbits of powerful language that you'll pause over, reread and then read back to fully understand its meaning. I wasn't so much taken with the love story (mm they love each other but why...). What really interested me was Cambodia, the most important character in this story, to me. This is a country shattered by evil so pervasive that it seems like its citizens will never be able to do anything but keep on show more living. It will hurt you to read this because Echlin doesn't just state facts, she makes you feel it, she gets inside the consciousness of a country. show less