A Wilderness Called Peace

by Edmund Keeley

Interwoven with the first-person account of Sameth, a woman of complex European-Asian background, is the story of the efforts of her former lover, an American diplomat, to track her down in a Cambodia shattered by war and convulsed by tyranny

315 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 1985

About the author

Edmund Keeley was an American novelist, translator, poet, and essayist, as well as a longtime professor of English at Princeton University. Renowned for his expertise in modern Greek literature, he translated and promoted the works of C. P. Cavafy, George Seferis, Odysseas Elytis, and Yannis Ritsos. His extensive body of work spans fiction, poetry, and scholarship, often inspired by Greece and its culture. He served as president of both the Modern Greek Studies Association and PEN American Center, and received numerous awards and honors, including the Rome Prize, Guggenheim Fellowships, and the PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation.

Reviews

[Cameron · Rating 1 out of 5]

This novel by poet and translator Edmund Keeley was inspired by his own father's experience as a senior staffer at the US Embassy in Phnom Penh in 1975, and in Thailand during later years. It begins well, with the journal of a Eurasian woman who has decided to stay in the city and take her chances with the Khmer Rouge. She writes to her American lover who has been forced to flee. The story jumps back and forth and all around, adopting the points of view of a variety of characters, and very quickly the prose deteriorates to a plodding, monotonous academic mumble, which combines with a lifeless story line to create one of the most boring books I have ever read. All of the characters have essentially the same professorial tone, and the use of journal entries as a means of describing events soon becomes maddeningly implausible. Even the author seems to be struggling to get through it, and ties up loose plot ends hastily at the end so that we can all get on with our lives. Not recommended to anyone.

[Kristin · Rating 5 out of 5]

An epistolary novel, told in letters. One of my very favorite books, and one the only novels I've ever read where people from different cultures speak in their own voices, from their own perspectives.