Book Thirty-four: The Disappeared

Book Thirty-four: The Disappeared
Finished: June 8
Pages: 235

How do you write about unspeakable things? How do you put into words the loss and despair faced by the survivors, by those who lived through these atrocities, who have families who go through them? How do you say these things, so that people will stop talking and listen?How do you put the loss of thousands upon thoughts of people into words?

This is the struggle faced by people who want to write about the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide, or the killings in Cambodia under Polpot. How do you write about something so violent, so horrible that it defies all speaking of it? Because in a way to put it in words is to acknowledge that human beings are capable of such violence. To put it in words limits the horror to the words on the page, and I don’t think that any words can truly encapsulate the systematic murders of any number of people, much less thousands upon thousands of people. Kim Echlin attempts to put the horror into words in the book The Disappeared.

She attempts to humanize the victims, to give faces to those who are now nothing but dust. She also attempts to give voice to the horror of the survivors, those who truly survived, and the walking dead to survived but not completely. For, as horrible as it is for those who are dead; the true pain is felt by those who keep living. “The tortured stay tortured. After the bodies were cleared, imagine what people had to do. Imagine the stench that clings” (103). Her unique blend of the far past, the recent past, and the present, jumping back and forth in the narrative, disorients the reader while also allowing the reader to feel the whirlwind romance of our narrator, Anne, as she meets, loves, loses, finds, and loses Serey, a Cambodian student and musician who is trapped in Canada after the closing of the Cambodian borders. When the borders re-open, Serey leaves without the much younger Anne to search for his family. Ten years later, Anne follows his face, haunted by images on the television. Some aspects of this book I think were really well done. I like the impact of the occasional super-short chapter. Some of her prose is excellent, calling up emotions and images that perfectly capture a moment or feeling. For example, when talking about her childhood, being brought up by a single father, on page 11 she says:

When he read to me he sometimes looked at the black and white picture of my mother on my bedside table. The focus is soft on the young woman holding a baby, me, and our eyes are locked together. Papa’s voice would drift away and I learned to wait quietly until his attention flickered from the photograph back to the page. I think I began to read this way, studying the words in an open book, waiting for absence to be filled.

The only thing that really annoyed me was the narrator herself. Maybe I’m just not romantic enough to really think that if I had fallen in love at 16 with a man considerable older than me that ten years after he left me I would travel more than halfway around the world to track him down with no address, much less that I would learn a completely new language, brave a war-torn country that was dangerous to travel in, much less without any plan or contact. Sometimes the sap is just so overwhelming that it feels too romantic for a novel about genocide. “I saw the world more sharply with you, as if I had put on new lenses, the left a little stronger than the right, but worn together they shaped blurred edges into clear lines, There were moments I would have liked not to see so sharply. Borng samlanh,[my dearest darling] I wanted to know everything about you. I was young and but slenderly knew myself” (43). Or for example, the entirety of Chapter 45: “I can still see a particle of dust hanging in a sunbeam near your cheek as your slept” (135).

Overall, I think that considering the subject matter, Echlin did a superb job. I certainly couldn’t put the book down. Many parts of the book will stick with me, much like I can still remember many parts of the movie Hotel Rwanda for the same reason, they are too haunting to forget.

“Long ago, when they emptied Phnom Penh, closed the borders, people remembered things, the last time they slept in a bed, the last time they saw a loved one. There was that last telegram out of Phnom Penh before all lines to the outside world were cut: I ALONE IN POST OFFICE. LOSING CONTACT WITH OTHERS. I AM TREMBLING. HOW QUIET THE STREETS. NOWHERE TO HIDE. MAY BE LAST CABLE TODAY AND FOREVER” (170).

Good reading,
Caitlin