Customer Reviews

Beyond the Horizon: Five Years With the Khmer Rouge

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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.

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.

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...

Perhaps it was the translation (poor quality) or the author's lack of writing and story-telling skills, but her account of what must have been a harrowing experience was not involving because the author's "voice" was totally devoid of emotions and visual descriptions. Her account read as if HAL (from 2001:A Space Odessey) had written it.
Or, to paraphrase Gertrude Stein: "There's no THERE there." I gave my copy to my local library.