Some books, in their purposefully rough-hewn, stutter-step fashion, can totally immerse you in a different place, a different life, a different frame of mind. They can get you inside the very lives of others.
Other books pull back from the living detail and use a wide-angle time lens to expose the dramatic, painful arc of a long interval of the human story.
“Displaced” does both.
In doing so, it exposes the mysterious interaction of the tiny circles of our lives with the enormous, slow-grinding circle of a blind, unfeeling history.
With each episode in “Displaced,” you are made to feel right “there,” in that specific place, with its unfamiliar frames of mind.
It is not, however, easy to be “there.” The “externals,” the places, the names, the clothes, the cologne, the caviar, the foods, are not the ones that make up our daily lives. The shell of life looks, sounds different from what we know.
But, while the external is unfamiliar, what’s inside is not.
Apprehension, dislike, fear, aspiration, anxiety, bumping up against the unexpected, petulance, anticipation, joy, desire, frustration, disappointment, acceptance and determination.
A fierce determination to live.
It’s the stuff that we are made of.
And it’s why we care about the characters so much.
Pulling back the time lens to see the long arc that encloses the action, the micro-specifics of this particular arc may also be unfamiliar to many of us. But the essence of this arc is known to us all.
Crisis, cruelty, butchery, catastrophe, punishment, torture, random violence, escape, pursuit and immigration have long been with us, have so tightly wrapped themselves around us for millennia. They are so commonplace that they have seeped into who we are.
All of us.
And this all happens regardless of whether the arc is triggered by a Xerxes or an Alexander, Genghis Khan or Tamerlane, Napoleon or Nelson, Hitler or Stalin, Saddam Hussein or al Baghdadi.
It is how our characters get tested, forged, twisted, cauterized or developed.
“Displaced” opens a window for us to see, at a very tangible, personal “you are there” level, the intimate cataclysms that our decisions (as dictators, tribes, conquerors or nations) set in motion. It exposes the implacable machinery of cruelties and unpredictable outcomes. It invites us to see the consequences by following the tough, resilient thread of a single life, one that is different from, but speaks for, the threads of millions of others.
Consequences that continue for decades.
We are, of course, our genes. We are also the surroundings that reared us. But just as powerfully, even though subconsciously, we are also reflectors of our own history, cascading down through many generations, into a future that will be different – externally. But, as we must have learned by now, a future that will always be the same.
This book is about those displaced through territory, enormous stretches of it. It is about those displaced through time, inhabitants of different histories colliding with each other.
It is most importantly, however, about those who have been displaced across the enigmatic, never-to-be-deciphered landscape of the human heart.
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“Displaced” is available, in print and Kindle editions, on createspace.com, amazon.com, Barnes & Noble and Booksmith.
EDITOR’S NOTE: The book review published above appears as the foreword in “Displaced.”