French ethnologist Francois Bizot's The Gate offers a unique insight into the rise of the Khmer Rouge. In 1971 Bizot was studying ancient Buddhist traditions and living with his Khmer partner and daughter in a small village in the environs of the Angkor temple complex. The Khmer Rouge was fighting a guerilla war in rural Cambodia; during a routine visit to a nearby temple, Bizot and his two Khmer colleagues were captured by them and imprisoned deep in the jungle on suspicion of working for the CIA. On trial for his life, over the next three months Bizot developed a strong relationship with his captor, Comrade Douch, who would later become the Khmer Rouge's chief interrogator and commandant of the horrifying Tuol Sleng prison where thousands of captives were tortured prior to execution. The portrait Bizot gives of the young schoolteacher-turned revolutionary and their interaction is simultaneously fascinating and terrifying.

Finally freed after Douch had pleaded his case with the leadership, Bizot became the only Western captive of the Khmer Rouge ever to be released alive, but his story does not end there. On his return to Phnom Penh, due to his fluency in Khmer, he was appointed interpreter between the occupying forces and the remaining western nationals holed up in the French embassy. As the interlocutor at the eponymous gate, he relates with dreadful resignation the moment when the Khmer nationals in the compound were ordered out by the Khmer Rouge forces for "resettlement."

Bizot's is a touching and gripping account of one of the darkest moments in modern history and it is told with a unique voice. As a Cambodian resident, a lover of Cambodia and a fluent Khmer speaker, Bizot shows an understanding of the prevailing mood in the country that other Western commentators have failed to capture effectively, while as a Western academic he is able to see the forces at work and how Cambodia fits into the bigger picture of South East Asian conflict. What emerges is a tale of a land plunged into insanity and Bizot tells it like a eulogy for a dead friend and a confrontation of old demons. The Gate is a stunning book and a must for anyone interested in this grim period of Asian history. --Duncan Thomson


From Publishers Weekly
"It's better to have a sparsely populated Cambodia than a country full of incompetents!" The speaker of this chilling statement is Douch, the Khmer Rouge true believer who ran the camp that held French ethnologist Bizot for the closing months of 1971, several years before the Marxist revolutionaries unleashed massive bloodshed on the small Southeast Asian country. In 1975, the Khmer Rouge's chaotic occupation of Phnom Penh confined the small French community in the city to the premises of the French embassy, the portal of which supplies this volume with its title. Married to a Cambodian citizen, Bizot was an unusual Westerner there, in that once the terror started, he showed little inclination to flee the country. Bizot exploited his status as a rare Khmer-speaking Westerner not only to escape execution but also to extract a measure of autonomy for himself. He frequently showed remarkable defiance toward his heavily armed and ruthless captors. Bizot's account maintains a melancholy tone throughout. Despite his frequent heroic acts, Bizot emphasizes his own frailty and weakness-when he's not looking to set the record straight. He remains especially angry at Western leftists who insisted that the Vietnamese played little role in Cambodia despite ample evidence to the contrary. What's especially striking is the apparent contradiction between Bizot's sympathetic portrait of Douch and his description of the countless murders Douch committed in the name of the revolution. For many Americans, the senseless tragedy of Cambodia remains a mystery; this elegant volume helps outline the contours of that tragedy from a unique perspective. Maps. 40,000 first printing. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Scholar Bizot was arrested in early 1970s Cambodia on the charge of being an American spy and eventually became the only Westerner ever to escape from a Khmer Rouge prison. Here's his story.Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
*Starred Review* A foreword by John le Carre may attract readers looking for a taut tale of fictional espionage. But what they will find in these pages is far more harrowing than any novel. As the only Westerner to survive one of Pol Pot's prison camps, Bizot saw up close the faces of the ideologues who dragged a once-peaceful country into the nightmare of genocide. Strangely, in recounting the harsh months he spent in captivity as a suspected CIA spy, Bizot describes his interrogator (Ta Douch) with deep respect--but also expresses profound grief at how this impassioned idealist degenerates into the worst kind of butcher. But release from Ta Douch and his other captors does not transport Bizot out of the maelstrom sweeping through Cambodia: eventually, he finds himself pressed into service as a translator and negotiator at the gate (hence the title) of the French embassy. It is through this gate that desperate asylum seekers try to escape from torture and death. But their ruthless Khmer Rouge pursuers, ignoring international law, pass through that gate as well, denying the French control of their own embassy compound. In his portrayals of the men and women turned away from the gate at which he stood vigil, and of those forcibly wrested away from the harried party that finally evacuates through that same gate, Bizot leaves his readers with haunting images of the doomed. Bryce Christensen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Review
“A harrowing narrative, worthy of a novel by Graham Greene or John le Carré… [It] possesses the indelible power of a survivor’s testimony.” --The New York Times

“It possesses such truth of feeling, such clarity and conviction of narrative, such a wealth of image and adventure, and such depths of long-held passion that I do believe it is indeed that rarest thing: a classic.” – John le Carré , from the Foreword

“A deeply unsettling account of a particular ordeal that suggests larger questions: the moralities of power's ends and means, the character of revolutionary fanaticism and the indecipherable humanity that flickers within it. . . . by turns evocative, wise and crisscrossed by fury.” – The New York Times Book Review

“[A] fascinating book, to say the least. Passages of The Gate are riveting, some scenes heartbreaking.” –The Wall Street Journal



Review
?A harrowing narrative, worthy of a novel by Graham Greene or John le Carré? [It] possesses the indelible power of a survivor?s testimony.? --The New York Times ?It possesses such truth of feeling, such clarity and conviction of narrative, such a wealth of image and adventure, and such depths of long-held passion that I do believe it is indeed that rarest thing: a classic.? ? John le Carré , from the Foreword?A deeply unsettling account of a particular ordeal that suggests larger questions: the moralities of power's ends and means, the character of revolutionary fanaticism and the indecipherable humanity that flickers within it. . . . by turns evocative, wise and crisscrossed by fury.? ? The New York Times Book Review?[A] fascinating book, to say the least. Passages of The Gate are riveting, some scenes heartbreaking.? ?The Wall Street Journal


Language Notes
Text: English (translation)
Original Language: French


Language Notes
Text: English (translation)
Original Language: French


From the Inside Flap
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.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"A literary and historical tour de force: what one man saw and did in a land of pristine beauty on the eve of one of the twentieth century's most barbaric spectacles." "In 1971, Francois Bizot was a young French scholar of Khmer pottery and Buddhist ritual working in rural Cambodia. Now, more than thirty years later, he has summoned up the unbearable memory of that moment, letting us see as never before those years leading inexorably to genocide. Perfectly recalled, indelibly written, The Gate recounts the nightmare of Bizot's arrest and captivity on suspicion of being an American spy, and his nearly miraculous survival as the only Westerner ever to escape a Khmer Rouge prison. It is the story, as well, of Bizot's unlikely friendship with his captor, Douch - a figure today better remembered as a ruthless perpetrator of the then-looming terror, about which Bizot tried, without success, to warn his government." Bizot's experience to that point would itself have merited report. But upon his return to Cambodia four years later, chance ordained a second remarkable act in this drama. As the sole individual fluent in both French and Khmer, Bizot found himself playing the intermediary in a surreal standoff when the Communist-backed guerillas now ascendant, laid siege to the French Embassy compound in Phnom Penh. Finally it would fall to Bizot to lead the desperate retreat of the colonial population: here he recounts how he helped the remaining Westerners - and any Cambodians he could - to escape the doomed capital.

FROM THE CRITICS

Arthur Salm - San Diego Union Tribune

"[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.

Sidney H. Schanberg - LA Times Book Review

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.

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."

Publishers Weekly

"It's better to have a sparsely populated Cambodia than a country full of incompetents!" The speaker of this chilling statement is Douch, the Khmer Rouge true believer who ran the camp that held French ethnologist Bizot for the closing months of 1971, several years before the Marxist revolutionaries unleashed massive bloodshed on the small Southeast Asian country. In 1975, the Khmer Rouge's chaotic occupation of Phnom Penh confined the small French community in the city to the premises of the French embassy, the portal of which supplies this volume with its title. Married to a Cambodian citizen, Bizot was an unusual Westerner there, in that once the terror started, he showed little inclination to flee the country. Bizot exploited his status as a rare Khmer-speaking Westerner not only to escape execution but also to extract a measure of autonomy for himself. He frequently showed remarkable defiance toward his heavily armed and ruthless captors. Bizot's account maintains a melancholy tone throughout. Despite his frequent heroic acts, Bizot emphasizes his own frailty and weakness-when he's not looking to set the record straight. He remains especially angry at Western leftists who insisted that the Vietnamese played little role in Cambodia despite ample evidence to the contrary. What's especially striking is the apparent contradiction between Bizot's sympathetic portrait of Douch and his description of the countless murders Douch committed in the name of the revolution. For many Americans, the senseless tragedy of Cambodia remains a mystery; this elegant volume helps outline the contours of that tragedy from a unique perspective. Maps. 40,000 first printing. (Mar. 11) Copyright 2003 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Scholar Bizot was arrested in early 1970s Cambodia on the charge of being an American spy and eventually became the only Westerner ever to escape from a Khmer Rouge prison. Here's his story. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information. Read all 6 "From The Critics" >

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

Jonathan Yardley

A powerful, disturbing book. — Washington Post Book World

Lucretia Stewart

An unnerving and miraculous mixture of beauty and horror. — Times Literary Supplement

Michiko Kakutani

A harrowing narrative, worthy of a novel by Graham Greene or John le Carr￯﾿ﾽ... possesses the indelible power of a survivor's testimony. — The New York Times

Michael J. Ybarra

"[A] fascinating book, to say the least, passages of "The Gate" are riveting, some scenes heartbreaking. — Wall Street Journal

Robert MacFarlane