Novel
L'Anarchiste
Not translated into English
Soth Polin · 1980
Synopsis
The book brings together two narratives written twelve years apart. In the first, in 1967, when the war between the communists and the monarchy begins, the narrator, a young philosophy teacher who holds politics in contempt, lets himself be led by his impulses: he deliberately flirts with drowning and falls madly in love with his cousin Sinuon. In the second, Virak, an exiled Khmer who has become a taxi driver in Paris, has had an accident on the banks of the Seine and tells fragments of his life to his passenger, a young Englishwoman who is dying.
Context
The first part translates a short story published in Khmer in 1967, Sans pitié, les fesses en arrière, banned under Sihanouk; the second was written directly in French, in exile. Patrick Deville, who prefaced the 2011 reissue, sees in it a political and historical novel, and above all a novel of madness, sex and death, in which autobiography and fiction are inextricably mingled. Unobtainable for thirty years and read in Cambodia in pirated copies, the book was reissued in paperback in 2011, then again in 2025 with illustrations by Séra.
Who it is for
For those who do not shrink from a raw and desperate narrative, between prewar Cambodia and the Paris of exile.
Prizes and reception
On its reissue, French critics hailed a “testament-book” and a rare testimony on Lon Nol's Cambodia.
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