Novel
A New Sun Rises Over the Old Land
ព្រះអាទិត្យថ្មីរះលើផែនដីចាស់
Suon Sorin · 1961
Synopsis
In 1960, Sam travels by train from Battambang to Phnom Penh as a delegate to a national congress, and the narrative traces the thread of his life. An orphan from the provinces, he tried to live honestly in the capital at the end of the colonial era: driver of a cyclo rented by the day, then factory worker, he came up against landlords, bosses and politicians who exploited him. With his wife Soy, he knew poverty: his cyclo is taken back, the couple is evicted, and Soy has to go into service with a rich merchant.
Context
The book appeared in 1961, eight years after independence, under Norodom Sihanouk's Sangkum, when the press law of 1957 left little room for critical novels. It won the first Indradevi literary competition, in which Sihanouk invited writers to support government policy, and became the best-selling novel of its time; it remains on the syllabus of many schools and universities. Its English translation by Roger Nelson, published in 2019, received the A. L. Becker Prize of the Association for Asian Studies.
Who it is for
For discovering a classic of the Khmer novel of the Sihanouk era, readable in English but not in French.
Prizes and reception
Reviewers of the English translation read in it a narrative that seeks to prescribe as much as to tell, in the service of modernisation.
Sources for this page 4
The pages consulted to check this page.