The Gate

The Gate

by Francois Bizot (Author), Francois Bizot (Author)

Synopsis

In 1971, on a routine outing through the Cambodian countryside, the young French scholar Francois Bizot was captured by the Khmer Rouge. Accused of being an agent of "American imperialism", he was chained and imprisoned. His captor, Douch, later responsible for tens of thousands of deaths, interviewed him at length; after three months of torturous deliberation, during which his every word was weighed and his life hung in the balance, he was released. No other Western prisoner survived. Four years later, the Khmer Rouge entered Phnom Penh. Francois Bizot became the official intermediary between the ruthless conqueror and the terrified refugees behind the gate of the French embassy: a ringside seat to one of history's most appalling genocides.

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More Information

Format: Hardcover
Pages: 286
Edition: First Edition
Publisher: Harvill Press
Published: 23 Jan 2003

ISBN 10: 1843430010
ISBN 13: 9781843430018
Book Overview: Written thirty years later, Fran ois Bizot's memoir of his experiences in the killing fields of Cambodia is, in the words of John le Carre, a contemporary classic .

Media Reviews
A harrowing narrative, worthy of a novel by Graham Greene or John le Carre... possesses the indelible power of a survivor's testimony. --Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times This mesmeric book is much more than a survivor's story.... 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 --Sidney H. Schanberg, LA Times Book Review 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. --Arthur Salm, San Diego Union Tribune A powerful, disturbing book. --Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post Book World [A] fascinating book, to say the least, passages of The Gate are riveting, some scenes heartbreaking. --Michael J. Ybarra, Wall Street Journal An unnerving and miraculous mixture of beauty and horror. -Lucretia Stewart, Times Literary Supplement A tour de force . . . as gripping and as revealing as anything to have come from the time when this once beautiful country descended into hell. -Michael Binyon, The Times (London) Memorably astonishing . . . I gasped time and again during the . . . reading of a book that manages to combine a spare and classical literary elegance with the recounting of a tidal wave of appalling episodes . . . I have never read a book like this. It is deeply moving and ineffably terrible; every intelligent person who has a care about this world and its people should read it. Bizot has done humankind a greatservice. -Simon Winchester, The Sunday Times (London) Distinguished by its intense dignity, by its unexpected attention to beauty, and by a discretion which never shades into coyness, The Gate should immediately be numbered among the great post-Second World-War memoirs of incarceration. --Robert MacFarlane, The Guardian (London) Breathtaking . . . Heartbreaking and terrifying: a superb account of the madness of war, and of a people's wholesale self-destruction. -- Kirkus The Gate is a thrilling, exquisitely observed and terrifying account of the world trapped in the moral cul de sac of absolute revolution. It reads like a novel and it sears both the conscience and the heart. If you only ever read one book on Cambodia, make sure it is this one. --William Shawcross, The Sunday Telegraph (London)
Author Bio
Francois Bizot is a French ethnologist who has spent the greater part of his career studying Buddhism. He is the Director of Studies at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes-Etudes and holds the chair in South-East-Asian Buddhism at the Sorbonne.