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Overview
In 1971 a young French ethnologist named Francois Bizot was taken prisoner by forces of the Khmer Rouge who kept him chained in a jungle camp for months before releasing him. Four years later Bizot became the intermediary between the now victorious Khmer Rouge and the occupants of the besieged French embassy in Phnom Penh, eventually leading a desperate convoy of foreigners to safety across the Thai border.
Out of those ordeals comes this transfixing book. At its center lies the relationship between Bizot and his principal captor, a man named Douch, who is today known as the most notorious of the Khmer Rouge’s torturers but who, for a while, was Bizot’s protector and friend. Written with the immediacy of a great novel, unsparing in its understanding of evil, The Gate manages to be at once wrenching and redemptive.
Synopsis
In 1971 a young French ethnologist named Francois Bizot was taken prisoner by forces of the Khmer Rouge who kept him chained in a jungle camp for months before releasing him. Four years later Bizot became the intermediary between the now victorious Khmer Rouge and the occupants of the besieged French embassy in Phnom Penh, eventually leading a desperate convoy of foreigners to safety across the Thai border.
Out of those ordeals comes this transfixing book. At its center lies the relationship between Bizot and his principal captor, a man named Douch, who is today known as the most notorious of the Khmer Rouge’s torturers but who, for a while, was Bizot’s protector and friend. Written with the immediacy of a great novel, unsparing in its understanding of evil, The Gate manages to be at once wrenching and redemptive.
The New Yorker
In 1971, Bizot, a French anthropologist in Cambodia, was taken captive by the Khmer Rouge and accused of spying. This unsparing memoir recounts his internment in a jungle camp, and his wary friendship with his interrogator -- an idealist who later became one of the most notorious torturers of the Cambodian genocide. Bizot's testimony has a rawness unmitigated by time: he excoriates the Americans for their inexcusable naïveté," and the French for allowing Communist sympathies to blind them to Khmer Rouge atrocities. In 1975, Bizot witnessed the fall of Phnom Penh to the guerrillas, and brokered a deal to evacuate Westerners. In a damning scene, Bizot observes a Frenchman who, crossing the border into Thailand, abandons his Cambodian mistress. As she is beaten by soldiers, her lover watches in silence, "adopting an inquiring look as if to exonerate himself."
Editorials
The New Yorker
In 1971, Bizot, a French anthropologist in Cambodia, was taken captive by the Khmer Rouge and accused of spying. This unsparing memoir recounts his internment in a jungle camp, and his wary friendship with his interrogator -- an idealist who later became one of the most notorious torturers of the Cambodian genocide. Bizot's testimony has a rawness unmitigated by time: he excoriates the Americans for their inexcusable naïveté," and the French for allowing Communist sympathies to blind them to Khmer Rouge atrocities. In 1975, Bizot witnessed the fall of Phnom Penh to the guerrillas, and brokered a deal to evacuate Westerners. In a damning scene, Bizot observes a Frenchman who, crossing the border into Thailand, abandons his Cambodian mistress. As she is beaten by soldiers, her lover watches in silence, "adopting an inquiring look as if to exonerate himself."Sidney H. Schanberg
This mesmeric book is much more than a survivor's story. It is an agonizing effort to understand what produced such horror and to get inside the Khmer mind.... Bizot has dug further into these mysteries and into the darkness of the Khmer Rouge than any other contemporary I know of....You will find unspoken echoes here of Hitlerism and Stalinism and Maoism, and every other mass slaughter carried out in the name of ideology and purification. Cambodia is no more dated than Srebrenica, especially at a moment when the clank of war machinery is in the global air again....Bizot spills out his viscera, and we see him as whole and as candidly as anyone can expect from a memoirist.....Many passages burn with a lyricism that reminds one of books we call classic literature.—LA Times Book Review
Arthur Salm
"[A} wrenching and haunted telling of two great adventures.... Yet "adventures" is a badly misleading word; it summons the notion of thrills where the only reality is terror, of excitement in moments of psyche-shattering danger, of shrewd calculations resulting in narrow escapes when survival depends on the rolls of cosmic dice. ... [The Gate is] steeped in politics yet ultimately concerned with matters of the soul....Despite himself, despite his passionate drive to get not only to the heart but to the soul of the matter, Bizot has written a classic of prisoner/escape literature. There are scenes of such dramatic power and clarity - the frantic, nerve-rasping chaos as freedom lies just yards away- that "The Gate" could be not unfairly called, if not categorized as, a thriller.—San Diego Union Tribune