Not an average tale of love, tragedy

In a slim novel, Echlin crafts work of beauty
By MARY JO ANDERSON
Sun. Aug 2 2009-

The Disappeared by Kim Echlin (Hamish Hamilton / Penguin Canada, $29)

The Disappeared by Kim Echlin tells a love story and also recounts the horrors in Cambodia under Pol Pot during the 1970s. (JANET BAILEY)

Picture, if you can, the Apsara dances of Cambodia and the stylized, sensuous movements through which a legend or story are told. Each dancer moves with liquid suppleness, balancing and turning with exquisite grace, all within a soundscape of music. Hands and feet curving — to resemble lotus blossoms perhaps — never stop their delicate turning. Beneath all the grace there is a muscular strength that propels it.

The Disappeared (Hamish Hamilton, $29) by Toronto author Kim Echlin, is a dance of words that resembles the Apsara dances in beauty, grace, sensuality and power. The sentences curve to reveal and make solid the images and ideas held within them. The book’s slim contour of only 228 pages holds such a weight of story and history.

In what is a seemingly impossible feat, the form is carved perfectly to the task — the book balances on the beauty. For Echlin, balance was a crucial element she sought during the long, difficult process of crafting this novel, which holds both a story of "abiding love " and of a genocide of unimaginable horror.

Echlin is able, by imagination and art, to take the reader on a journey through eros and evil — a journey that travels into utter darkness but does not leave us in despair.

The Disappeared tells the story of Anne Greves, a girl of 16 and of her lover, Serey, who at 21, is a student from Cambodia, in Montreal during the late 70s. They meet at a blues bar where Anne has snuck in underage. The two are inexorably drawn to each other and become lovers.

Music pervades the opening pages of the book like smoke in a jazz club. "Bones work their way to the surface," Anne states as she begins to reveal the story from a vantage point 30 years later, back in Montreal.

I had an opportunity to speak with Echlin about the bones of the novel when she participated in the Banff International Translation Centre program at The Banff Centre. This program offers authors and translators a unique opportunity to meet and discuss their work. Echlin was able to confer with two translators who were working on The Disappeared during the program; one translator was from China, another from Spain.

For Echlin, a trip to Cambodia eight years ago with her husband and young children, seeded this novel that was seven years in the making. A woman spoke to Echlin in a marketplace and told "her story very quietly" and it was this revelation of personal tragedy that impelled Echlin to want to "create a voice that used storytelling to witness" the genocide in Cambodia.

Echlin explains there is a long history of "testimonial writing," both fiction and non-fiction, especially in other cultures. Holocaust literature from the Second World War, and witnessing literature from South America, are two examples of art attempting to describe the indescribable.

The novel was very long, at one point, Echlin says, and she had written from many different narrative voices in different versions. She had sent an early form of the manuscript out to publishers only to have it rejected. At that point Echlin rethought the work.

"I wasn’t sure that I had the capacity to do it, but I set the whole thing aside. Two weeks later I was back at it. . . . I didn’t even look at the other versions. I started fresh."

Echlin then found the voice the story required. "I came to the idea of the ‘you’ voice."

The novel is told through Anne Greve’s narration using second person narrative, which uses the narrator to address another character. This technique draws the reader into the story. More than the voice, Echlin also found the form the book required.

"I thought that the shortness, the brevity would have its own power." She pared the book down to its essence. And Echlin knows from years of research, of listening, of reading truth commissions from Africa and Argentina, how dark the journey can be.

"To read the stories of torture, of massacres — it is actually part of being a witness — you need a place where you can go, where you can breathe again." Echlin creates these moments for her characters and for her readers.

When Anne first meets Serey, she is a high school student living with her father, an engineer who specializes in medical prosthetics. Her mother died when Anne was two and her father has been a lonely and distant man since.

"When he read to me he sometimes looked at the black and white picture of my mother on the bedside table. . . . Papa’s voice would drift away and I learned to wait quietly. . . . I think I began to read this way, studying the words in an open book, waiting for absence to be filled."

So when Anne first sees Serey in the nightclub she is ready to read the world through him. Their love is portrayed sensuously and Echlin offers acute perceptions of a young girl’s entry into the adult world of love and loss.

"A girl wears her lover’s clothes . . . because she is trying to understand why she feels both freed and broken." At one point Anne says, "The world is outside the garden." Deep in the book, there is a page, blank except for this single sentence: "I can still see a particle of dust hanging in a sunbeam near your cheek as you slept."

Anne becomes aware of Serey’s history and the fact that he has not heard from his family in four years, since a telegram warned him not to return to Cambodia. During those four years, the outside world had little knowledge of the genocide under the Khmer Rouge regime led by Pol Pot.

When Serey learns the borders have opened he must return to search for his family. This wrenching apart of the two lovers separates them for more than a decade until Anne believes she sees Serey during a news broadcast and determines to travel to Cambodia to find him.

The soul of the book (the love story can be seen as the body of the book) is the 150 pages that detail Anne’s awakening to the horrors of the Cambodian genocide.

"This thing is sure: Time is no healer," Anne remarks remembering her mother’s funeral and carrying all she knows of Serey and Cambodia.

I ask Kim Echlin if art can be a healer. She responds by saying, "If healing means being able to go on and to hold the story but not forget — then yes, art does that, I think." After a pause Echlin emphasizes, "It’s more, healing is not forgetting."

In The Disappeared, Anne meets an artist named Vann Nath on her journey through Cambodia.(Nath is a real person — a survivor of the torture camp Tuol Sleng, one of only seven survivors of the more than 5,000 prisoners.) Nath tells how he survived the camp by painting pictures of Pol Pot.

But after "it was over he began to paint the tortures, the pictures of Tuol Sleng."

Anne thinks of art, music, and the chorus of Antigone: "Human cruelty turned into a note of music, the rhythm of a sentence."

Kim Echlin has wrought a work of singular beauty, a work which turns "human cruelty" into the image of a particle of dust by a lover’s cheek, into the rhythm of the sentences that carry knowledge of the world so all may witness.

Echlin has worked as a producer for CBC’s The Journal and as a reporter