The population still largely lives in fear - no one wants to talk about the country’s history of genocide, they merely want to get on with their lives.Ĭhan shook her head. The Vietnamese forces that occupied Cambodia when the Khmer Rouge was removed from power have gone, only to be replaced by the UN and other Western aid agencies. She packs her bag and flies to Cambodia to look for him. Eleven years later, she thinks she sees him on a TV broadcast at a political rally in the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh. When the Cambodian borders are re-opened, Serey returns home to look for his family. Their relationship is frowned upon by Anne’s father, but there is little he can do to prevent the affair, which blossoms in the music clubs of downtown Montreal during the late 1970s. In The Disappeared - Echlin’s third novel - she tells the tale of Anne Greves, who as a 16-year-old motherless teenager, falls in love with an older man, Serey, a musician turned math tutor in exile from his native Cambodia. Others still, disappeared never to be seen again.īut how do you tell this truly disturbing story in fictionalised form without banging people over the head, aka A Sunday at the Pool in Kigalistyle?Ĭanadian Kim Echlin does it by framing it around a beautiful, all-consuming love story. Why do some people live a comfortable life and others live one that is horror-filled? What part of ourselves do we shave off so we can keep on eating while others starve? If women, children and old people were being murdered a hundred miles from here, would we not run to help? Why do we stop this decision of the heart when the distance is three thousand miles instead of a hundred?ĭuring Pol Pot’s brutal regime in Cambodia (1975-1979) more than a million people were killed and buried in mass graves. Fiction – Kindle edition Hachette Digital 256 pages 2010.
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