Khmer Rouge Dept: Janie is a medical researcher in Montreal. When her friend and mentor, Japanese-Canadian neurologist Hiroji Matsui, vanishes, her own life unravels. She leaves her husband and child and moves into Matsui’s apartment. There, she unearths the fragments from his past that intersect with her own upbringing in Cambodia, according to Globe And Mail. Hiroji Matsui’s elder brother, it turns out, was likewise consumed by Cambodia. A Red Cross doctor working in Phnom Penh in 1975, James Matsui also went missing inside the nightmare. Both his experiences in captivity and his sibling’s futile four-year vigil for him, across the border in Thailand, are narrated with the same crisp intensity and dogs at the Perimeter is the young Montreal-based writer’s second novel. It aims to render intimate a catastrophe the scale of the Cambodian genocide, and to inhabit the psyches of three of its victims. Add to this a time frame of several decades, with much of the narrative told via flashbacks and dreams, along with scene changes from wintry Canada to tropical Cambodia. Here is a modest-sized fiction with outsized ambitions. The intersection is actually a collision, propelling her memories back 30 years. Raised in a middle-class household in Phnom Penh, Janie was 11 when the Khmer Rouge marched into the capital. The sheer madness that ensued, the abject darkness that fell over the country as Pol Pot attempted to establish a lunatic utopia using the corpses of two million people as foundation, are revealed through the eyes of a child. Thien tells of the family’s destruction, and the girl’s ordeal with her younger brother, in brisk, vivid strokes. As
reported in the news.
@t phnom penh, middle class household
11.5.11
