flowerrunner's review against another edition
2.0
I liked parts of this though it was very hard to get into because the characters and situations are so mixed up and interwoven. I almost DNFed, though the middle got me hooked. Then at the end, I had a lot of trouble again. I just didn't really understand what was going on anymore.
marbh's review
challenging
mysterious
reflective
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.0
The timing of the book was confusing and there was very little context given during the entire thing.
snowmaiden's review against another edition
3.0
To try to understand this book and why the author wrote it, I read several interviews with her. In one, she said she wrote it because she was "curious" about the Khmer Rouge and that period of Cambodian history. In another, she said she didn't feel the book was successful, that the words she produced were insufficient to get her meaning across. I think I agree with her. This book isn't perfect by a longshot, and yet there was definitely value in reading it.
First of all, the flashbacks to the time of the Khmer Rouge are absolutely gutting, and I say this as someone who read many, many Holocaust survivor stories during my youth. I thought that I was desensitized to accounts of starvation, misery, and man's inhumanity to man, but this book proved me wrong. It prompted me to learn more about this period of Cambodian history, and I suppose that is worth something. However, I have to wonder why Thien decided this was her story to tell. Although she is of Asian heritage, she's not Cambodian, and her curiosity seems to be the only reason she decided to write about this period. It felt somewhat exploitative to me that she did so.
The main setting of the book is 2005, and it opens in Montreal. Janie, a neuroscientist who escaped from Cambodia as a young child after witnessing many atrocities (and who still seems to suffer from unacknowledged PTSD) is obsessively searching for her friend and colleague, Hiroji, who has disappeared. (Her single-minded focus on finding him is part of what has led to an estrangement from her husband and young son.) We learn that Hiroji most likely left Montreal due to a lead in his decades-long search for his brother James. Eventually (mild spoiler alert) we catch up with James and find that he himself has been searching all this time for his wife and son.
So every character is simultaneously searching for someone and being sought by someone else, and each of them becomes so obsessed with the quest in front of them that they are blinded to the pain they are causing to others. (James felt he couldn't talk to Hiroji until he found his wife and son, Hiroji didn't tell Janie that he was leaving because he didn't know how to explain it, and Janie herself ignores the needs of her husband and son back home in Montreal.) There's something a little bit too tidy about this situation, but it does illustrate the way that unresolved trauma isolates us. When you get stuck looking for what you have lost, you can't see all the other possibilities in front of you, and paradoxically, trying to clutch on to one particular relationship can destroy all the other relationships you still have.
Obviously, reading this novel triggered a lot of thoughts and feelings for me. It was so unsettling and incomplete that I had to struggle to come up with my own ideas about what it was trying to tell me. This was certainly a valuable experience for me as a reader, yet I cannot say this novel succeeds as a narrative.
First of all, the flashbacks to the time of the Khmer Rouge are absolutely gutting, and I say this as someone who read many, many Holocaust survivor stories during my youth. I thought that I was desensitized to accounts of starvation, misery, and man's inhumanity to man, but this book proved me wrong. It prompted me to learn more about this period of Cambodian history, and I suppose that is worth something. However, I have to wonder why Thien decided this was her story to tell. Although she is of Asian heritage, she's not Cambodian, and her curiosity seems to be the only reason she decided to write about this period. It felt somewhat exploitative to me that she did so.
The main setting of the book is 2005, and it opens in Montreal. Janie, a neuroscientist who escaped from Cambodia as a young child after witnessing many atrocities (and who still seems to suffer from unacknowledged PTSD) is obsessively searching for her friend and colleague, Hiroji, who has disappeared. (Her single-minded focus on finding him is part of what has led to an estrangement from her husband and young son.) We learn that Hiroji most likely left Montreal due to a lead in his decades-long search for his brother James. Eventually (mild spoiler alert) we catch up with James and find that he himself has been searching all this time for his wife and son.
So every character is simultaneously searching for someone and being sought by someone else, and each of them becomes so obsessed with the quest in front of them that they are blinded to the pain they are causing to others. (James felt he couldn't talk to Hiroji until he found his wife and son, Hiroji didn't tell Janie that he was leaving because he didn't know how to explain it, and Janie herself ignores the needs of her husband and son back home in Montreal.) There's something a little bit too tidy about this situation, but it does illustrate the way that unresolved trauma isolates us. When you get stuck looking for what you have lost, you can't see all the other possibilities in front of you, and paradoxically, trying to clutch on to one particular relationship can destroy all the other relationships you still have.
Obviously, reading this novel triggered a lot of thoughts and feelings for me. It was so unsettling and incomplete that I had to struggle to come up with my own ideas about what it was trying to tell me. This was certainly a valuable experience for me as a reader, yet I cannot say this novel succeeds as a narrative.
booknerd_am_i's review against another edition
5.0
Audiobook. Beautiful narration. Heartbreaking story.
spacestationtrustfund's review against another edition
4.0
The prose in this novel was absolutely gorgeous.
katiep's review
dark
reflective
sad
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
3.0
darren_cormier's review against another edition
4.0
Madeleine Thien’s Dogs at the Perimeter, which concerns how totalitarianism affects memory and personal identity, generations after the fall of the regime, how we define ourselves when your own historical references have been mutated and destroyed. Its narrative is non-linear, and it shifts viewpoints, mostly concerning the search for identity and family decades after escape. Each person has multiple identities as the Khmer Rouge told everyone to forget their families, that they had no identity, that their identities were all due to the Angkar (or the Organization.) Names were changed, pasts were encouraged to be forgotten, daily indoctrination sessions were held, especially with the children. Over time, especially with starvation and physical labor, memories are warped and buried.
There are no words to define the depravity and systematic destruction caused by the Khmer Rouge, no words in the English language exist to encapsulate their malignance. Their oppression is all-consuming.
Thien’s short novel explores the interconnecting lives of a handful of people, and how their experiences with the Khmer Rouge, all directly, but some more so than others, affects their lives decades later.
It opens with the disappearance of a Hiroji, prominent neuroscientist and colleague of Janie, who despite our current technological surveillance abilities, managed to disappear from society. “In this world of constant surveillance and high security, it is still remarkably easy to vanish. People go to great lengths to abandon their identities, holding no credit cards or bank cards, no insurance papers, pension plans, or driver’s licenses… Many of the missing, the officed, went on, no longer wish to be themselves, or to be associated with their abandoned identity.” Survivor’s guilt and the oppression of memories.
There are no words to define the depravity and systematic destruction caused by the Khmer Rouge, no words in the English language exist to encapsulate their malignance. Their oppression is all-consuming.
Thien’s short novel explores the interconnecting lives of a handful of people, and how their experiences with the Khmer Rouge, all directly, but some more so than others, affects their lives decades later.
It opens with the disappearance of a Hiroji, prominent neuroscientist and colleague of Janie, who despite our current technological surveillance abilities, managed to disappear from society. “In this world of constant surveillance and high security, it is still remarkably easy to vanish. People go to great lengths to abandon their identities, holding no credit cards or bank cards, no insurance papers, pension plans, or driver’s licenses… Many of the missing, the officed, went on, no longer wish to be themselves, or to be associated with their abandoned identity.” Survivor’s guilt and the oppression of memories.
northernatlas's review against another edition
4.0
Thien's grasp of threads is immediately disarming. The initial chapters invite you into a warm pool of confusion, of loss, of missing pieces. As the story progresses, as "Mei" recounts her childhood being ripped from her under the Khmer Rouge communism, Thien's true talents as a storyteller take hold. "Mei" alludes to the life that her family had before the end of the war, before the Khmer Rouge dismantles their city and steals her away from her possessions. But it is the lives they try to live -- the debunked hospitals that they must enter, and the shallow graves they must ignore and all at once embrace -- in Year Zero, in the new regime, that grabs you by the throat. The numerous lives she and her brother, and even her mother, must lead are all so arbitrary, and yet all so integral to their survival. While we hear only what she knows of her father's disappearance, into the back of a truck to be sent for further "education," we are given a dose of what that reality may have been through King James. Hundreds of thousands, millions, whatever the number bleeds into, there are so many lives ripped apart and sewn back together again in the light of the new, hostile, suspicious regime. Soldiers build themselves out of dirt, shedding the capitol of their pasts, only to be thrown to the newer, bigger, hungrier wolves that rise up from the jungle. Despite the commitment to cleansing, to purification, to attaining equality by denouncing your family, your ancestry, your past, each and every one of us holds out hope that the threads of our hearts still exist, still billow in the wild wind, and that we may some day find them again.