Beyond the Horizon: Five Years With the Khmer Rouge [Hardcover]

Laurence Picq (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A Westerner who suffered under the genocidal regime of Pol Pot in Cambodia between 1975 and 1980, Picq offers terrifying testimony on the ability of a small group of fanatics to enslave and dehumanize an entire society. The French author, formerly married to a Cambodian, writes that she was resented as a member of a former colonial ruling presence and despised elite. After four years of working as a recruit in Khmer Rouge offices and in a camp in deserted Phnom Penh, the pregnant Picq and her two daughters were subjected to a 23-day forced march to the Thai border, described in exhaustive, grim detail, during which she suffered the birth and death of a son. The ordeal ended when the author and her daughters were given refuge in the Cambodian embassy in Peking. After the breakup of her marriage, Picq returned, with her children, to France.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

This is a unique perspective on the murderous Khmer Rouge regime, written by a naive and idealistic young Frenchwoman who lived in Kampuchea from 1975 to 1980. Married to a fanatic Communist official, Picq did propaganda work for the foreign ministry in Pnomh Penh. She depicts that city as a monastic barracks of poverty ruled by fear and suspicion, with food used as a weapon of control. This is a rather slight account that tells next to nothing about the broader picture, particularly in the countryside. Only the description of the brutal forced march evacuation of Pnomh Penh in early 1979 grips one's attention. Picq's narrative is disjointed, and her style alternates between the elegiac and the prosaic, yet her book is worth reading for the light it sheds on a particularly gruesome page of contemporary history.
- Steven I. Levine, Duke Univ., Durham, N.C.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 218 pages
• Publisher: St Martins Pr; 1 edition (June 1989)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312028717
• ISBN-13: 978-0312028718
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,419,673 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A remarkable story told from a unique point of view., January 22, 2001

By 

R. ARANT "Toun" (Lanesville, Indiana USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Beyond the Horizon: Five Years With the Khmer Rouge (Hardcover)

A French citizen marries a Khmer Rouge cadre in France, then follows him through China back to Cambodia after Pol Pot came to power. The only story like this to have yet been told, the author provides insight into the daily routine of fear and insecurity within the world of the Khmer Rouge. One scene describes Ieng Sary giving a speech during which he waved his copies of the "confessions" forced from the regime's "internal enemies" at an interrogation center later known to the world as S-21. Readers who want to know more about S-21 from the perspective one of the few surviving prisoners should read Vann Nath's "Cambodian Prison Portrait". David Chandler's "Voices from S-21" is the definitive work on S-21, the site where thousands of Khmer Rouge cadre were toruted and killed. "Beyond the Horizon" has been published in French, Khmer, and English, and thereby also serves as a great language learning tool for students of things Cambodian. Laurence Picq is indeed fortunate to have escaped both S-21 and the grasp of her twisted and paranoid husband, who also survives. An upcoming book by Richard Linnett, "The Eagle Mutiny", will tell the story of two Americans who died in their bizarre efforts to be accepted as members of the Cambodian revolution. "Beyond the Horizon" is simply remarkable, truth far stranger than any fiction.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A unique account of life under the Khmer Rouge, December 14, 1999

By 

Richard Powell (KLIA, Malaysia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Beyond the Horizon: Five Years With the Khmer Rouge (Hardcover)

It is a year since I read this book and it sticks in the mind. In the original French it is gripping and all the stronger for not being written in purple prose - the writer saves her emotion for the the concluding chapters where she realises the extent of the cruelty of the Khmers Rouges and of the deceptions played on her. (She loses her child to malaria - a disease the KR claimed was all but eradicated.) The gradual loss of her illusions is perhaps the real subject of the book. Given that it is the only account we are likely to have from a Westerner of life at the heart of the KR apparat we are as well served as we could hope to be.

I note that the only other person who seems to have read this book describes the writer as a "bourgeois Marxist". I am not sure if this is either accurate or fair: If I recall correctly Ms Picq came from a blue collar background; and any connexion between the KR and the 19th century thinker called Marx is pretty tenuous.

0 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Beyonde the horizon, March 3, 2010

By 

Tmnvan Bakergem - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Beyond the Horizon: Five Years With the Khmer Rouge (Hardcover)

This story of a french woman, married yo a cambodian career revolutionay is sometimes quite incredible. It is quite understandable that she complains about the beheviour of her husband who is more interested in his career than in his family. But suddenly there is a new child in the family..... From the same husband. And the family stays in distress...