9780670069088

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!

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.