Music through the Dark: A Tale of Survival in Cambodia

From Booklist
Lafreniere retells the story of Daran Kravanh, a survivor of the Khmer Rouge reign in Cambodia. Written in Daran's voice, with photographs and historical information added by Lafreniere, the book recounts the terrorism of the Khmer Rouge, and the political dogma that stripped Cambodians of their possessions, families, and lives. Daran was born into a musically talented family of nine children and a culture that cherished music. After his family was separated and Daran was under strict control of the Khmer Rouge, he found an accordion, an instrument he had loved since childhood. The Khmer Rouge allowed him to play with a group of captured musicians, soothing captors and captives alike with their music. Daran also adopted a spiritual outlook that enabled him to maintain his sanity and to assist others. He nearly gave up living when he learned about the death of his family, but again music saved him. This is a beautiful, poetically written story about the endurance of the human spirit and the sustaining and restorative powers of music. Vanessa Bush
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


From Kirkus Reviews
A remarkable as-told-to memoir of survival, combining frequent reveries regarding the fragile beauty and traditions of Cambodia with an often horrifying narrative of the genocidal reign of the Khmer Rouge.Relief worker Lafreniere indicates in her prefatory note that this book evolved as a literary account of a personal experience told by one person and written by another. She first met Daran Kravanh, a Cambodian refugee, in 1992 at the Refugee Assistance Program of Tacoma, Washington. Her account of Kravanh's sufferings and exile sacrifices neither immediacy nor authenticity in its telling; Lafreniere's clean prose captures the lilt and fragility of Kravanh's voice. Their collaborative prose is graceful and clear, firmly anchored to an enduring cultural history reliant upon an abundance of natural spiritual metaphors, Buddhist roots, and the prominence of familial roles in determining larger social bonds. It is perhaps partly on account of the very gentleness of the Cambodian people (a trait reflected in the voice of Kravanh's narrative) that the Khmer Rouge were able to come to power in the first place. Though the nature of their regime is well known, Kravanh is able to offer fresh perspectives, tracing how the faction broadened its reach gradually and insidiously during the early years of its rise, and he even arrives at difficult insights regarding his countrymen's susceptibility to this particular evil. The tale of Kravanh's endurance is not pretty: over the years, he is shifted between various communal projects where hunger is enforced and infractions against Angkar (the Khmer state) bring summary execution, and he eventually loses most of his family (beginning with his father, a highly regarded police official) to the bloodthirsty regime. His survival comes through startling, seemingly foreordained means: early on he finds an abandoned accordion (an instrument he had learned to play as a child), and he is frequently saved from execution or otherwise rewarded by Khmer soldiers who wish to hear him play. This provides a subtle commentary on the loneliness and need underlying the most bestial of human impulses.Despite the nightmarish undertones of violence and despair, a nimble, probing, memorable story that ought not be overlooked among recently published, higher-profile Khmer-era Cambodian narratives. -- Copyright © 2000 Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


From the Inside Flap
"I cannot tell you how or why I survived; I do not know myself. It is like this: love and music and memory and invisible hands, and something that comes out of the society of the living and the dead for which there are no words." So begins the extraordinary story of one man's experience of Cambodia's holocaust during the 1970s. As Anne Frank did in her Diary, Daran Kravanh takes readers into the heart of a horrifying tragedy-one that claimed the lives of his parents and seven siblings and as many as three million other Cambodians. Among those murdered were thousands of intellectuals and artists; as a musician, Daran was himself a target for execution, but it was his talent for playing the accordian that saved his life. Throughout the Khmer Rouge period, the accordian became for Daran a seemingly enchanted instrument through which the spirit of life traveled. From an early age Daran loved music. When a troupe of musicians arrives at his father's house, the eight-year-old Daran sees and hears an accordian being played for the first time: "It was magical, not sound alone but sound accompanied by light and warmth. It was a strange voice, like one from far away and at the same time within me." That night he plays an old folk song perfectly and effortlessly on the accordian, without instruction. Years later, starving and exhausted after weeks of forced labor, Daran will perform the same song while surrounded by his Khmer Rouge captors, who will spare his life after hearing him play. Time and again Daran will be brought to the brink of death and then saved, uncannily, by someone who wants to hear his music. Music through the Dark is not just a book for those interested in Southeast Asian history or the Cambodian diaspora. It imparts a deeper understanding of the soul while providing a searching exploration of physical and spiritual survival, of meaning inherent in nature and existence. It is an original, unforgettable tale told with a quiet wisdom and insight that lifts the story out of the violence that generated it and the violence that it describes.


From the Back Cover
"We are privilieged to have the story of Daran Kravanh's life during the Khmer Rouge genocidal reign told so beautifully. Bree Lafreniere allows us to understand the greatness of the spirit and its ultimate triumph over darkness. This book is an extraordinary record of the Cambodian soul." -Dith Pran, Cambodian holocaust survivor whose story inspired an award-winning film, "The Killing Fields" "Not in a long time have I read a book so horrifying and so beautiful. What a species we are: capable of unimaginable brutality and, equally, of unimaginable grace. We plunge into the depths of both in Music through the Dark, a story about life, death, and destiny in Cambodia. The book is part poetry, part elegy; half fairy tale, half nightmare. And it is all true, and full of truth, about the potential of human evil and the exquisite saving grace of music and the human spirit from which it arises. Told in an artless yet strangely lyrical voice, the story of Daran Kravanh is not just a tale of survival but of survival through one of the darkest pits of hell as created by Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge soldiers. . . . It is a story every one should know and no human being should experience." -Alex Tizon, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Seattle Times


About the Author
Bree Lafreniere earned a B.A. in sociology from the University of Oregon and served as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Solomon Islands. She lives in Tacoma, Washington, where she has worked with refugees since 1989.


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