Publishers Weekly
Asking Ellen DeGeneres-sound-alike Anna Fields to narrate this haunting novel of a veteran who goes missing while revisiting Vietnam to make peace with the atrocities he witnessed and committed doesn't initially sound like an inspired idea. However, Fields's narration of this Scotia Bank Giller Prize-winning book (Canada's highest book award) really works. With more than 200 audiobooks to her credit, Fields (aka Kate Fleming, and an Audie Award winner) has a master's touch, and her restrained delivery melds perfectly with Bergen's spare and Hemingwayesque text. Her deadpan delivery works for the narrator's voice as well as it does for Ada Boatman, who travels to Vietnam to find her veteran father, Charles. Fields's only weak note is the voice she uses for the taciturn Charles. As the book shifts between Ada's and Charles's points of view, Field's expertise becomes apparent, especially in her meticulous attention to detail, such as the correct pronunciation of the copious Vietnamese phrases and places in this tale. Simultaneous release with the Random House hardcover (Reviews, Oct. 31). (Dec.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.
Library Journal
The memory of a war and a missing father brings Ada Boatman to Vietnam, where past and present, father and daughter, and two cultures collide. Simultaneous Random hardcover. Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
A Canadian soldier's return to Vietnam 30 years after the war sends powerful ripple effects throughout several lives, in Winnipeg author Bergen's moving fifth novel. A brief prologue locates Charles Boatman's adult daughter Ada and her younger brother Jon in Danang, seeking Charles, who has disappeared. Bergen then juxtaposes multiple stories. We learn of Charles's youth in Washington state, years of marriage and fatherhood in British Columbia and separate traumatic experiences in combat halfway around the world, and back home, where he's confronted by his wife Sara's infidelity, and her early death. Then, as he seeks the past in postwar Vietnam ("thinking . . . he might conclude an event in his life that had consumed and shaped him"), Charles finds only piercing echoes of the violence he had both suffered and perpetrated, with sadly foreseeable results. A parallel narrative follows Ada's travels and discoveries (with and without Jon) as she follows her father's gradually fading trail, dodges the attentions of a 14-year-old hustler-entrepeneur (Yen) who appoints himself her guide and guardian, and falls into a subdued sexual relationship with a middle-aged artist (Hoang Vu) who seems as perplexed by her obsession with him as does Ada herself ("Perhaps he was the country, or her father, or simply a notion of the country, or a notion of her father"). Bergen presents "the sorrow of war" as an exfoliating fog that grips and obscures all the war's victims-on the battlefield, in shared memories and in dreams filled with disturbing indigenous images. And, in excerpts from a combat novel written by a former North Vietnamese soldier-in which Charles (who reads it) finds his own sins and sorrowsmirrored-the unity of human suffering is made stunningly, heartbreakingly clear. A beautifully composed, unflinching and harrowing story. Perhaps the best fiction yet to confront and comprehend the legacy of Vietnam.
From the Publisher
Luminous. . . . 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.”
-Publishers Weekly
“A beautifully composed, unflinching and harrowing story. Perhaps the best fiction yet to confront and comprehend the legacy of Vietnam.”
-Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“[Bergen] preserves the exquisiteness of the Vietnamese culture, lending a unique beauty to the story. Highly recommended.”
-Library Journal
“Bergen’s best writing evokes the absence of what has been lost and, even more terribly, what is not there to be found.”
-Globe and Mail
“With his thoughtful dialogue, Bergen makes the characters’ heartache seep off the page.”
-Time
“David Bergen is a master of taut, spare prose that’s both erotic and hypnotic. Set mostly in modern-day Viet Nam, The Time In-Between is a deeply moving meditation on love and loss, truth and its elusiveness, and a compelling portrait of a haunted man, Charles Boatman, and his daughter who seeks to solve the mystery of his disappearance.”
–Miriam Toews, author of A Complicated Kindness
“David Bergen’s The Time In-Between is about how children inherit their parents’ ghosts and the elusive nature of grace. It also makes a stunning connection between the wars that are fought out in the world, and the ones that cleave families in private. Ravishingly told and deeply felt, it’s a huge accomplishment.”
–Michael Redhill, author of Martin Sloane
“The Time In-Between is a spare, suspenseful meditation on the long reach of war – to the places where it is fought, the people who fight it, and the people who love those people. In portraying the lingering devastation left in one soldier’s life by a war he fought a generation ago, Bergen’s novel could not be timelier or more chilling.”
–Jennifer Egan, author of Look at Me
“In this elegant novel, David Bergen weaves a precise and resonant prose through the connected histories of people touched by love, death and war. A lovely, sad, and ultimately redeeming work of fiction.”
–Brady Udall, The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint
“Intelligent, humane, deep in its sympathetic understanding, David Bergen’s novel explores the haunted life of the Boatman family in the late aftermath of the Vietnam War. There is in this novel not a single sentimental or euphemistic line; and because the writing is honest, the characters are real, and their struggle as a family has the ring of truth.”
–Donald Pfarrer, The Fearless Man: a Novel of Vietnam
DEC 07/JAN 08 - AudioFile
Ada and Jon comb Vietnam for their missing father, Charles, a troubled veteran who has returned to the scene of a wartime atrocity. Ada hunts doggedly as Jon pursues homosexual liaisons. The story of their quest is periodically interrupted by flashbacks of the father’s angst-ridden odyssey. Minor narrative holes may have resulted from abridging the book to four listening hours. As read for the CBC by Michael Hogan (the father's sections) and Tricia Collins (Ada's chapters), melancholy and gloom overwhelm the story. While the former performs serviceably, the latter is a particularly bland reader, whose air of listless hopelessness is relieved only by moments of mild shock. The text has more colors and energy than she invests in it. Y.R. © AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine