The Time In Between
A Novel
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- $99.00
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- $99.00
Descripción editorial
In search of love, absolution, or forgiveness, Charles Boatman leaves the Fraser Valley of British Columbia and returns mysteriously to Vietnam, the country where he fought twenty-nine years earlier as a young, reluctant soldier. But his new encounters seem irreconcilable with his memories.
When he disappears, his daughter Ada, and her brother, Jon, travel to Vietnam, to the streets of Danang and beyond, to search for him. Their quest takes them into the heart of a country that is at once incomprehensible, impassive, and beautiful. Chasing her father’s shadow for weeks, following slim leads, Ada feels increasingly hopeless. Yet while Jon slips into the urban nightlife to avoid what he most fears, Ada finds herself growing closer to her missing father — and strong enough to forgive him and bear the heartbreaking truth of his long-kept secret.
Bergen’s marvellously drawn characters include Lieutenant Dat, the police officer who tries to seduce Ada by withholding information; the boy Yen, an orphan, who follows Ada and claims to be her guide; Jack Gouds, an American expatriate and self-styled missionary; his strong-willed and unhappy wife, Elaine, whose desperate encounters with Charles in the days before his disappearance will always haunt her; and Hoang Vu, the artist and philosopher who will teach Ada about the complexity of love and betrayal. We also come to learn about the reclusive author Dang Tho, whose famous wartime novel pulls at Charles in ways he can’t explain.
Moving between father and daughter, the present and the past, The Time in Between is a luminous, unforgettable novel about one family, two cultures, and a profound emotional journey in search of elusive answers.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Ada Boatman and her father, Charles, cross borders in Canadian author Bergen's luminous fourth novel. As their surname suggests, the in-between approximates the watery space between life and death. The narrative alternates between Ada's and Charles's points of view, between their separate experiences in contemporary Vietnam and their past together in the Pacific Northwest. Charles, an isolated American Vietnam veteran turned Canadian woodsman, raises his three children Ada, Jon and Del in British Columbia after their mother's death. As they scatter into adulthood, Charles retreats further into the memories (especially the terror of a single day of combat) that keep him at arm's length from life. When a fellow veteran sends Charles a novel written by a Vietnamese soldier, the story moves Charles to revisit Vietnam. There, he attempts to peel back the dark shroud of memory, but he cannot make peace and disappears instead. Ada and Jon follow their father to Danang, where they confront his past, and where Ada, whose life has been defined by her father's long sadness, learns to forsake her unmoored existence in favor of inner reconciliation. In this meditation on the aftereffects of violence and failed human connection, Bergen's austere prose illustrates the arbitrary nature of life's defining moments.
