The Map of Lost Memories by Kim Fay

(Book Review)

Why I Read This Book
This book came to my attention because one of my students presented on it for her weekly reading journal.  (In order to encourage extensive reading, I require my advanced students to keep reading journals and talk about their weekly reading at the end of each week.  Among other things, one of the big advantages of this is that I get lots of good reading recommendations from my students.)

My student gave an enthusiastic review of this book, which she described as a somewhat fantastic adventure story and treasure hunt set in French colonial Cambodia in the 1920s.  I was intrigued enough by her description to go to the bookstore and track this book down.

The Review
Now that I've read the whole book, I have to confess that I'm a bit underwhelmed.  It's not a bad book per se, but, the story doesn't pay off as well as I expected it would.

I think we've all read these kind of books: the kind of books where the beginning and the initial premise are very exciting, so you plunge right in and keep turning the pages.  And then, somewhere in the middle, the story starts to stall, and you realize this book isn't going to be that exciting after all.  But by that point, you're already more than halfway through, so you just decided to finish it for the sake of finishing it.  Have you ever read that type of book?  Because that was exactly my experience with this one.

It starts out well.
I was pleasantly surprised to find out that Kim Fay can actually write.
The book jacket identified Kim Fay as a former ESL teacher, and said this was her first novel.  Being an ESL teacher myself, I know from experience that we're a miserable talentless group,  so I was slightly worried this book would be clumsy and amateurish.  But it's not.  At least not at the level of the prose style.  Kim Fay writes beautiful vivid descriptions of 1920s Shanghai, Saigon, Phnom Penh, and the Cambodian jungle.
The story, at least in the beginning of the book, is well described, the characters are intriguing, and initially the action moves at a pretty fast clip.

The problem is that the story completely loses momentum around the middle.
This is a mystical treasure hunt story in the same genre as The Da Vinci Code.  And as with The Da Vinci Code, there are several plot twists along the way. As the story progresses, it turns out many of the characters have ulterior motives, and it also turns out many of them have a previously unrevealed inter-related family history.

The problem with all of these complications and revelations is that they have the potential to really slow the action down.  In The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown dealt with this problem rather well by integrating all of these big reveals in the middle of one long chase story.  In The Da Vinci Code, the characters find out all the plot details and shocking reveals right in the middle of breathless escapes and action sequences.
As cheesy as Dan Brown's writing was (and I know he has plenty of critics), you've got to admit it at least kept you turning the pages.

 The Map of the Lost Memories takes the opposite approach.  The characters find out more about each other, and about the mystery, by sitting around and talking to each other for pages and pages and pages on end.  And, unlike The Da Vinci Code, this does not make you want to keep turning the pages.  (Unless you're the type of person who thinks, "I can't wait to get to the next page so I can see these characters talk some more!")

I've read some reviewers describe this book as "more of a character study than an action story".  That's true insofar as it is definitely not an action story, but calling it a "character study" might be being too generous. It perhaps has ambitions to be a character study, but how three dimensional do these characters actually become?  What do we actually learn of them?  The characters in this book are not deeply examined or described: each character has one single motivation and there a couple defining character traits, and we really don't get much more in depth than that.

The ending of this book, when it finally comes, is also pretty underwhelming.

So, I'm not sure I'd go out of my way to recommend this book to anyone.
Still...not a bad little book, really.  Mediocre, but it has its moments.

Other Notes
* I rather like the review of this book from The Washington Post, which sums up nicely the strengths and weaknesses of this book:

Too bad that we don’t like her [Kim Fay's] characters more. Too bad that we reach the last page before we are given any human justification for their choices. Too bad that a hand comes, ex machina, to solve every twist and turn. By then, alas, a serious reader has thrown in the towel. So many rules have been broken.

But if you’ve traveled this far, hang on. Despite the rigidity of the characters, despite a suspicion that none of the serial coincidences can be remotely true, there is something captivating about this novel. Call it authorial confidence, a sense of place, a splendid Technicolor. ... . “The Map of Lost Memories” has one beautifully met purpose: It brings Cambodia alive.

[Full Review Here]

*  There are some hints that I might not be in the target audience for this book.  That is, perhaps this book is designed to appeal more to the sensibilities of a female audience than a male audience.
I say this with caution, because I'm probably going to get in trouble for talking in generalities about gender preferences, but there were a few points in the book where I wondered if  what I was reading might be targeted more towards a female audience.
About halfway through the book, the reader discovers that the emphasis of this book is actually not on the adventure story, but on the emotions of the characters, and how they feel about each other and their relationships.  I began to find this all very boring, but was this just because I was in the wrong demographic for this book?   And I especially started to wonder when I got to  chapter 10, entitled "The Right Dress", in which several paragraphs are devoted to describing the feelings of the main character towards different dresses she tries on, and how the various dresses make her feel.

* Regular readers of this blog (if there are any) will perhaps remember that a few weeks back I mentioned this book in connection with my review of Andre Malraux's Cambodian adventure story: The Way of the Kings.
In the back of the book, Kim Fay mentions (twice) that the real life story of Andre Malraux and his wife Clara Malraux was her inspiration for the fictional characters of Roger and Simone Merlin.
Roger Merlin is portrayed as being self-obsessed, egotistical, and being a fake idealist who is publicly committed to communism but privately only concerned about using the cause to advance his own ego.  So far, so much like the real Malraux [see Christopher Hitchens article HERE].
But...the Roger Merlin in Kim Fay's book is also psychotic, a serial wife-beater, and a potential murderer.  To the best of my knowledge, none of this was true of the real Malraux.  [Standard blogger disclaimer: I'm not an expert, someone let me know in the comments if I'm getting this one wrong.  But none of my Internet research on Malraux has turned up any of this.]
Now, obviously Kim Fay is using a loose inspiration.  Roger Merlin in this book is much older than the real Andre Malraux would have been in the same period anyway.  And (without giving too much away) the fictional Roger Merlin meets a much different fate than the real Andre Malraux did.  And it's the author's freedom to take historical events and use them as loose inspirations to tell completely different stories than the ones that actually happened.  But then, should the author's afterward explicitly identify Malraux as the inspiration for the violently abusive misogynistic Roger Merlin?  Wouldn't it have been better to leave that part off the page?  Or at the very least, add a disclaimer that certain liberties have been taken?

* Geography notes: I got slightly disoriented when the characters drove directly from Saigon to Angkor Wat, and then doubled back to Phnom Penh.  This didn't seem like the most logical route to take, but I think the implication was they decided they wanted to see the wonders of Angkor Wat first before dealing with the hassle of Phnom Penh.  (The motivations for this were a bit unclear in the book.)
I'm a little bit skeptical that it was so easy to drive up to Angkor Wat in the 1920s.  (Didn't most people take the boat back then?) But I have to confess I don't really know.  I don't suppose anyone out there in Internet land can help me out on this.  Was there a functioning road up to Siem Reap in the 1920s?  Let me know in the comments section.

* Although not overly concerned with history, this book is a type of historical fiction in the sense that it uses a historical time period as its backdrop, and various references are made to historical personages and events from that time--the kind of small details that us history nerds really lap up.  For example, in the Shanghai section, there are a few references to the Chinese Communist party, and to the Cominterm advisor Voitinsky (who was someone I discovered while writing this college paper on the formation of the Chinese Communist Party.)
But there were also some questionable historical details.  For example, from page 10:

Irene was not political, but she wasn't ignorant either.  She knew about Communists, and not just how they raided the tsar's palaces, scattering Botticellis and Rembrands to pay for their rebellion.  She also knew they controlled the Koumingtang and wanted to take over Shanghai, and China altogether if they could manage it.

 The Communists never had control over the Koumingtang, did they?  Even before the 1927 purge, weren't the Communists always just a minority inside the Koumingtang?

* As mentioned above, for all its faults the book is very good on descriptions.  I found this description of the mid-day heat in Indochina particularly good:

...the air felt as if it were being pushed through a furnace.  It was that merciless equatorial hour that circled around noon like a vulture, when no alternative, not even hiding in a dark room with an electric fan, could bring the kind of relief a person needed, a relief that reached one's core.
Beneath the sun-speckled tunnel of tamarind boughs that arched all the way to the cathedral, the Rue Catinat was deserted.  In Seattle [the main character's hometown], midnight to dawn were the silent hours.  In the tropics it felt as though the days were turned inside out.  Irene gazed at silhouettes of hammocks that looked as if they had been painted into shaded doorways.  There was not a single European on the street, and the Orientals seemed to have collapsed wherever they had been standing when the sun reached its apex.  (p. 114-115)

 Link of the Day
Solutions to the Israel Palestine Conflict