BEYOND THE HORIZON: Five Years with the Khmer Rouge

by Laurence Picq ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 10, 1989

Horrifying account of a Frenchwoman's infatuation and disillusion with Poi Pot's genocidal communist regime in Cambodia. Picq's nightmarish interlude with the Khmer Rouge began in 1975, when she and her three daughters flew to Phnom Pehn to rejoin her husband, Sikoeun, an official in Poi Pot's revolutionary government. At first, Picq harbored dewy-eyed dreams of helping to establish a People's Paradise--a fantasy dented as soon as she landed in Cambodia and found the capital city emptied of all occupants. In this upside-down society, all ""bourgeois"" elements had been abolished, including such decadent practices as shaking hands, spending money, or using the pronoun ""I."" Kept more or less imprisoned in giant government buildings in the abandoned capital, Picq and her cohorts swallowed official propaganda about freedom-loving workers tilling the countryside in a haze of revolutionary bliss--until the starvations, brutalities, denunciations, and disappearances grew too obvious to ignore. As the terror multiplied, Picq developed what she calls ""two-way armor,"" the ability to shield her inner being from exposure to, or assaults from, the outer world. Yet still she clung to the shreds of her revolutionary faith through forced marches, inhuman degradations, even the death of her infant son, finally fleeing to Peking and then France only after Khmer Rouge doctors attempted to poison her daughters. Just as harrowing as earlier Khmer Rouge memoirs (To Destroy You is No Loss, 1987; Stay Alive, My Son, 1987), this may have added piquancy for some readers as the only firsthand account of Pol Pot's savagery written by a westerner. Memorable as a survival story, but even more as a cautionary tale showing how noble ideals can blind even the most intelligent of witnesses.

Pub Date: July 10, 1989

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1989

Categories: NONFICTION