Lauren Bufferd

The Disappeared, Canadian Kim Echlin’s poignant love story set against Cambodia’s troubled history, has two epigraphs: the first, a verse celebrating the destruction of all culture before the Year Zero, and the second, a brief message. It reads “Tell others”—a wishful implication that even after a national tragedy, there will be someone to mourn the missing. As the U.N.-sanctioned trials for Cambodian genocide continue (now almost into their second year), Echlin’s novel is a devastating reminder of that time, a fictional look at one of the lowest points of the 20th century.

Echlin’s heroine, Anne Greves, was 16 when she first met Serey in a Montreal blues club more than 20 years ago. She was in high school, and he was a Cambodian college student who had left his country at the beginning of Pol Pot’s regime. Their attraction was immediate. In no time, Anne was dividing her time between Serey’s cramped yellow-walled apartment and smoky clubs, with little time left over for high school or her widowed father. But Serey missed his family, and when the borders to his country reopened, he returned, never to be heard from. After a decade of silence, Anne convinces herself that she’s spotted Serey in a television documentary. She travels to Phnom Pehn and though she locates him, he remains emotionally elusive and secretive about his family as well as his job. Soon Serey disappears again and Anne’s search becomes an obsession, leading her to desperation and even madness.

Echlin chooses to have Anne tell her story as if addressing Serey directly. The dual first-and second-person “I” and “you” create a cadenced momentum and immediacy to the prose. This rhythm is consistent with Anne’s resolve, which only increases as she locates and then loses Serey again. The novel’s style is lush and poetic, but there are times when Anne’s erotic memories and despair undermine the force of her story. It is almost a relief when she encounters Will, a forensic scientist, who helps out at a crucial moment and whose plainspoken sympathy re-grounds the book.

From 1975 to 1979, 1.7 million Cambodians died, some for just remembering what life had been like before the Khmer Rouge. The Disappeared is a passionate and emotionally wrenching novel that forces us to remember and provides witness to what was lost.

Lauren Bufferd writes from Nashville.

The Man in the Wooden Hat, a compelling new novel from acclaimed British novelist Jane Gardam, marks the return of Sir Edward Feathers, the central character in Gardam’s prize-winning Old Filth. Feathers (nicknamed Filth, an acronym for Failed in London, Try Hong Kong), is a retired judge who returns to England with his wife Betty after a long and lucrative career as a barrister in Asia. In a rambling but highly charming manner, Old Filth followed Feathers from his birth in Malaya and unhappy fostering in Wales (one based on that most famous of colonial authors Rudyard Kipling) to a tranquil-seeming marriage and retirement in the peaceful English village Donhead St Ague.

The Man in the Wooden Hat tells Betty’s story and serves as a companion piece to Old Filth. Like Feathers, Betty was born in Asia, but instead of being sent as a child to be boarded and schooled in Great Britain, she remained with her parents even after their detention in a Japanese internment camp. After working as a code breaker at Bletchley Park during the war, she returned to Hong Kong and met Feathers. His intense need for companionship elicited a deeply-felt sympathy from her and they quickly entered into a marriage more of sense than sensibility. The one reckless action in her otherwise carefully controlled life is a fling with the aptly named Terry Veneering, Feathers’ nemesis. Though the affair is brief, the relationship never quite loses its spark, and Betty remains preoccupied by what her life might have been like had her decisions been different. 

What makes The Man in the Wooden Hat so good is the way Gardam delves into the complexities lurking behind her character’s masks of studied conformity. Feathers’ hearty competence barely conceals an almost pathological fear of abandonment stemming from his complicated and violent childhood. From the outside, and perhaps even to Filth, Betty is a capable, conservative matron, a pillar of church and garden club, but readers get a glimpse of the clever and impetuous girl she once was and the warm, affectionate woman she still could be. All the passion that is missing from her marriage is poured into sporadic visits to Veneering and his son Harry for whom Betty quickly develops a range of convoluted feelings, sexual and maternal. She stands by the promises she made to Filth but at an enormous cost.

Gardam’s writing is both precise and vivid. Word by carefully chosen word, she creates intricate, multi-sensory pictures, not just of an Empire long gone, but also present-day England as seen through the somewhat baffled eyes of the elderly couple. The reader is utterly transported, hearing the cacophony of the Hong Kong harbor, smelling the dusty, shabby rooms of Filth’s first chambers in London’s Temple Bar, and feeling the rich soil crumbling beneath Betty’s fingers when she plants tulip bulbs in her British garden.

Telling the same story twice requires a facility that Gardam handles with ease, though even she cannot prevent a certain overall slightness to The Man in the Wooden Hat. The final plot revelations cannot help but direct the reader back to Old Filth points But you don’t need to be familiar with both to be moved by Betty’s life, by the decisions she makes, and the honorable way she conducts herself, even at the expense of her own happiness.

In After the Fire, a Still Small Voice, debut novelist Evie Wyld chronicles the stories of three generations of an Australian family whose lives are shaped by conflict and trauma. Battle may be the experience that connects the Collard men, but it also proves to be the family’s ruin. Again and again, family bonds crumble in the aftermath of death and war. Lack of a simplistic resolution and the searing descriptions of the changeable land and seascapes make this gritty, passionate novel stand out.

After the Fire unfolds against a precisely rendered backdrop of quiet city streets, dense bush and the vivid expanse of the ocean. The book opens with Frank’s journey to a beachfront cabin that belonged to his grandparents. We learn that his mother died when he was a child and that his father Leon was an alcoholic. Frank barely manages his temper and has bolted after a bad break-up with his girlfriend. He cobbles together a passable life for himself, living in the cabin without running water, using the sea for his daily ablutions and picking up work at the docks. The book then shifts back in time to Leon’s childhood in 1950s Sydney, to the small bakery his immigrant parents ran, and to the devastating effects of his father’s wartime experience in Korea. Soon after Leon takes over the bakery, he is drafted to serve in Vietnam. At this point, the chapters following Leon’s experience as a soldier alternate with those that trace Frank’s troubled life by the beach. As their lives unfold and the wounds are recounted, the reader begins to wonder if any kind of reunion is possible—or even desirable.

After the Fire is not a book of simple feelings. The visceral descriptions of the emotional and physical anguish experienced by the characters grow numbing, and the plotline involving missing girls in Frank’s seaside neighborhood is an unnecessary diversion. Still, one must admire Wyld for her courage—a less tough-minded writer would find an easy way for these two damaged souls to reconcile. Wyld shows that there are some ties that, once broken, may not be worth repairing. But like the still small voice referenced in the scriptural passage of the title, she also knows people carry on after a disaster, perhaps in an unimagined direction, but moving forward all the same. 

Lauren Bufferd writes from Nashville. 

It's been nine years since Jayne Anne Phillips' last book and almost 30 since the acclaimed author burst on the scene with her dazzling short-story collection Black Tickets. Like her previous work, Lark and Termite uses highly evocative, poetic language to explore the complexities of ordinary relationships—mothers, fathers, daughters, lovers—but this time, they're set against a wider backdrop of war and environmental destruction.

Lark and Termite tells two overlapping stories: the death of Robert Leavitt, a young soldier in Korea in 1950, and four days in the life of his severely handicapped son on the eve of a great flood nine years later. These two characters never meet, but their intuitive sense of one another fuels this intensely spiritual novel.

Termite and his half-sister Lark live with Nonie, their aunt and caregiver, in small-town West Virginia. Termite is unable to walk or talk, but the teenage Lark bears the burden of his care lightly, almost joyfully. Hovering over this family are the spirits of Termite's father and the children's mother, the unstable, enigmatic Lola, who could not take care of either child.

Using multiple narrators, Lark and Termite invites the reader to experience the perceptions, memories and desires of the characters. Phillips has a gift for narrative voice and shifting time, from the brisk no-nonsense tones of hard working Nonie to Leavitt's erotically charged recollections of Lola. Even Termite, in a literary nod to the character of Benjy in Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, expresses himself in intense monologues of sensory observations. Events and actions echo and repeat themselves like a carnival hall of mirrors, and Phillips doesn't shy away from bold symbolism or her notion that the bonds of love—familial, erotic, paternal—can conquer time and space. Only once does the book step from the spiritual to what reads as a plot contrivance, and this change in direction strikes an artificial note. Still, one misstep is a small price to pay for any reader who welcomes Phillips' return to fiction.

Lauren Bufferd writes from Nashville. 

Americans have become acquainted with best-selling French author and director Philippe Claudel through his award-winning film I’ve Loved You So Long in which Kristin Scott Thomas plays a woman re-entering society after serving time in prison. Claudel’s superb new novel Brodeck also features a protagonist who is thrust back into the world after a horrific experience.

Brodeck takes place in an unnamed European village in the aftermath of a terrible, but unspecified, war. Brodeck, who earns his living writing reports for a government bureau, has returned to the village after two years in a concentration camp. A stranger arrives in the village where his odd manner and habits draw suspicion. After he exhibits his drawings of the village, he dies in a mysterious accident. Brodeck is told to write an authorized account of the stranger’s death, essentially a whitewash of the incident, which provokes Brodeck into secretly writing a description of his own troubled past.

Brodeck’s first line is an assertion of his innocence in the stranger’s death. But as he tries to unravel the mystery, his own life story pushes to the foreground. Though Brodeck has grown up in the village, he arrived there as a fremder (a stranger) and, during the war, he was interned in a camp where his life depended on almost a complete negation of his humanity. With his return to the community, he worries that his survival only reminds the villagers of their collective guilt, and their fear of the stranger proves to Brodeck that, again, they will sacrifice one they think is not their own. 

Brodeck has a fairy-tale quality, but it is of the Brothers Grimm variety, filled with dark woods, wandering strangers and mysterious feasts. The village is peopled with rural archetypes, but their actions—some cruel, some kind—have a disturbing specificity. Although there are occasional mentions of modern machines, the lack of a precise time or location adds to the air of the unfamiliar. Like other explorers of the 20th-century experience—Elie Wiesel, J.M. Coetzee, Franz Kafka—Claudel is a novelist of ideas and abstractions, but he weaves a powerful spell with this engrossing tale.

Lauren Bufferd writes from Nashville.

Australian writer Tim Winton is an acclaimed author of poetry, short stories, novels and children's books. His eagerly awaited and unforgettable new novel Breath is a story of lost innocence and youth, recollected in anything but tranquility. Breath is a study of the signposts of adolescence – searching for like-minded friends, resisting complacency and crossing boundaries – but also an acutely observed cautionary tale of the damage left behind by extreme behavior.

Breath is simple enough on the surface. Bruce Pike, nicknamed Pikelet, is a bored and lonely teenager, the only child of withdrawn parents in a small West Australian town. Drawn to the sea, he pairs up with wild child Loonie and they begin to spend time swimming and surfing. They share a delight in risk taken for its own sake. They are befriended by an older couple, a hippie surfer, Sando and his unhappy wife, Eva. Half guru, half cohort, Sando encourages the boys to take their fun to dangerous extremes, such as surfing in shark-inhabited waters, isolated reefs and stormy swells. But there is more menace at home: as Pikelet's relationship with Eva develops, her addiction to risky sexual behavior pushes him out of his depth. The consequences of their doomed affair linger in the adult Pike, who is scarred by suppressing urges that he once let run wild.

In a series of extraordinarily vivid scenes, Winton brilliantly balances Pikelet's vulnerability and endurance against the boundless and unrelenting forces of air and water. He excels at transitions, capturing the precise moments where surfing becomes as much a spiritual discipline as a sport or a casual affair turns into a blur of risk-taking sex. This is not an easy book, despite its brevity, but it is a stunning one and one whose visceral imagery will remain with the reader long after the story is over.

Lauren Bufferd writes from Nashville.

Dear Husband, I lost our children today. The newly widowed Rehana addresses these startling words to her husband's grave in A Golden Age, the accomplished first novel by Tahmima Anam. Declared unfit by a judge, Rehana has had her children taken away, given to her wealthier brother-in-law and his wife in Karachi, leaving Rehana doubly bereaved in Dhaka, East Pakistan. This division subtly echoes the partitioning of India itself and the further dividing of Pakistan into East and West. By the second chapter, 20 years have passed. It's now 1971 and the children are long reunited with their mother, but the shame of having lost her children and the scheming it took to get them back has stayed with Rehana over the decades.

As her children become politically active, Rehana finds herself drawn into Bangladesh's war for independence. Her son, Sohail, convinces Rehana to bury guns beneath the rose bushes and use the second house on their property as a hiding place for nationalist soldiers. Later in the novel, she follows her daughter Maya to work in a refugee camp outside of Calcutta. What motivates Rehana, however, is not political ideals but a desire to keep her family intact at all costs.

A Golden Age ably balances the prosaic and the painful aspects of life during wartime. Scenes that describe venturing out to buy a chicken for a wounded soldier's dinner or gathering with friends to sew old saris into blankets for refugees powerfully contrast with a frightening journey to retrieve a neighbor from a military prison or the discovery of a former tenant in a refugee camp who is so traumatized that she cannot speak. Anam, who was born in Bangladesh but educated in Europe and the U.S., has an assured prose style and an ease with the material gathered from research, interviews and the memories of a grandmother who sheltered young soldiers in her home during the war. At the close of the novel, Sohail asks Rehana how the conflict could be both the greatest and worst thing we have ever done, a striking realization of war's sharp contradictions from such a young and gifted writer.