A beautiful book in form, a beautiful and sober writing, but also from the bottom, a descent into the abyss. The portal is the first portal of the Embassy of France in Cambodia, which, from April 17 to May 7, 1975, marked the border between life and death. This is also the symbol of the crossing of the author's mirror, itself happened in the world of the dead from October to December 1971: at the end of the book, telling his return to Cambodia, he learned of a peasant he is the only survivor of the camp where the Khmer Rouge had held in the jungle for more than three years before they took power. The book tells these two episodes, with honesty and fairness that I believe absolute. Incidentally, the leaders of the Cambodian tragedy appear one after the other: willful blindness of left intellectuals (dinner with Jean Lacouture at the beginning of the book, the episode of Steinbach couple French Communist teachers and propagandists of the glory of Pol Pot ) stupidity of Americans (Spiro Agnew's visit is a bravura performance), Military inability of the Lon Nol regime, conjures Sihanouk, Vietnamese support for the Khmer Rouge (Vietnam will soon regret it), etc. The story of the siege of the Embassy of France and what followed was even more moving than the story of the detention Bizot in the jungle, but it contains the query that continues to prosecute the author: by what aberration of fate he had life to save one of the worst torturers of this time?
