Storytelling in Cambodia:

I met Willa 2 1/2 years ago on a pilgrimage in India. Until this book was released I had never read anything that she had written. It is always a little awkward when someone you know does something like write a book. If you don't like it, the situation can call for the greatest diplomacy. Happily, diplomacy is not necessary in this case. This is a wonderful book, and I hope that any of you contemplating reading it will do so. First of all, it is exquisitely written. That may sound like a funny thing to say about a published book, which many people assume must be well written. But that is, sadly, often not the case. Willa has a virtuosic command of her craft. She writes beautifully about difficult subjects, and in the process they go down easily. We live in an era when everything is amplified to death, but Willa lets the stories tell themselves, and this makes them all the more powerful. Willa told me that some publishers considered this book too dark, but I would disagree. The subjects are dark, but I think Willa's writing makes them accessible. It is a remarkable ability, to be able to present difficult subjects in an accessible and powerful way. Willa does something else that is quite extraordinary in the way she writes from the perspectives of different people. The most astonishing example is that of Pol Pot's wife, who was an idealistic young student in Paris, and who eventually went insane. To even attempt getting inside the mind of someone like that is an extraordinary idea, and Willa carries it off with power and skill. It speaks not just to her ability as a writer, but to the depth and breadth of Willa's humanity. When you add her knowledge of Asian history and mythology, you have writing of rare depth and texture. Not all of the poems are about Cambodia, by the way, and overall the book is warm and comfortable in a way that may at times seem astonishing. It is quite a unique book, and if you are tired of canned commercial literature, and you want to read something that is really creative and new, you need look no further.

Willa Schneberg lets us know in her Acknowledgements that she spent time working in Cambodia, after the fall of Pol Pot. But this long-incubated book is something far greater that a mere memoir, in poetic language. Rather, the author has brought off a combination of history, myth, and political outcry, all imbued with the transcendent connections of heart and spirit expressible only via poetry. Schneberg renders creatures both as otherworldly as the demigods of Cambodian myth and as drably fallen as the more recent French colonialist bureaucrats and Khmer Rouge factotums. There's compassion of a kind for them all, plus, to be sure, a grief as vast as Jeremiah's. Indeed, the poems make telling connections between the Jews' Holocaust and that of mid-'70s Cambodia, and with such a subject, sorrow must be counted the collection's reigning emotion. Also, however, this book delivers an almost supernatural uplift, forever spying out the miracle of survival and small kindnesses. As the tragedies go on, the storytelling too gathers force. So the unconquerable will to know the truth and to share it with others rises to a greater power -- in Schneberg's ultimate affirmation -- even than that of the killing fields.