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Customer Reviews of The Gate

The book of a lifetime.
Since I met the author in Chiang Mai a decade ago -- when he somewhat reluctantly described his experiences as a prisoner inside the infamous Khmer Rouge M13 prison camp commanded by "Douch" and gave me a copy of the safe-travel pass written for him by a North Vietnamese officer during the first of Bizot's many brushes with death -- this was the one great book I impatiently awaited. As it turns out, "The Gate" is far more powerful than I could ever have imagined. Readers will find it painful to read through their tears, but will be unable to lay the book down. As John Le Carre writes in the foreword, "Now and then you read a book, and, as you put it down, you realize that you envy everybody who has not read it, simply because, unlike you, they will have the experience before them." The brilliantly written introduction shows how little the world has changed since the historic disaster in Cambodia. In contrast to many Frenchmen, Bizot saw the Americans as allies in 1970, but recognized an "inexcusable naivete" in the Americans, and he comments, "I do not know what to reproach them for more, their intervention or their withdrawal." As for the French government of that day he comments, "... fear of appearing to support the Americans so froze minds that nowhere in Europe were people free enough to voice their indignation and denounce the lies (of the Vietnamese and Cambodian communist revolutions)." In one of his verbal duels with his interrogator, Bizot questions the insane logic of the revolutionary, asking if the Khmer Rouge cadre did not see that the revolutionary line was just a trick constructed using basic Buddhist traditions to deceive the people and itself, just as it used the name of Sihanouk as a mask. For me there will never be another book quite like Bizot's to come from a Westerner. Bizot is a man who lives life his way, thinks his own thoughts, follows no man or no government blindly. A true citizen of the world. Fortunately, Cambodians have recently started writing their own stories, and it will truly take river of ink to record the horrors they have experienced. New books by the Documentation Center of Cambodia (dccam.org) go into great detail on the barbaric tortures used at camp M13 and at Tuol Sleng, tortures which even Bizot could not have dreamed of at the time he was held there.

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Beautiful first half - second half wasn't as engrossing
The story of Bizot's internment in the camp, and his conversation's with Douch, are incredibly vivid and take one as far as it probably possible to go into the mind of a committed revolutionary, to try to understand how it's possible for a man who is by no means sadistic or insane to commit acts of torture and genocide.

The other reviews are right: this is not the book to read if one wants an overview of the Khmer Rouge years - other than a timeline and some assorted details, you don't get much - but it is valuable for shedding a great deal of light on the ideological foundations of the revolutionaries and the ensuing massacres. I'm not sure why some people seem to praise Le Carre's introduction independent of the book: unless he has some other motive, it seems strange that a man would have the intelligence to write a good introduction but lack the acuity to actually know what a good book is.

Le Carre mentions Bizot remoteness in real life, and this distancing really extended to the memoir as well - although the book is filled with a great deal of conviction and sadness, I always got the feeling that the author was holding his cards close to his chest. His then-wife keeps getting mentioned sporadically, but despite his repeated desire to see her again, we never get to know her or understand her importance to his life: the same for his daughter Helene. We find out more about random holdouts in the embassy than we do about them, which is strange for two people who are supposedly such a huge part of his life. You never really feel like the writer is telling you everything.

The second part of the book is still well-written, but something of a mess. Lacking the twin poles of the narrator and Douch, his captor in the camp, which anchor the first part of the memoir, the book starts getting spread too thin. Hundreds of characters seem to emerge and disappear - too many horrific events take place for any of them to have the necessary impact, which is of course part of the impossibility of doing justice to any mass tragedy.

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Pathetic and Self-Serving
Francois Bizot's "The Gate" is more a story of Bizot's inaccurate and self-serving portrait of himself as a selfless hero than a story of the true tragedy that was the Cambodian Holocaust ... of which he was involved in only a small and insignificant way. The story revolves around two encounters he experienced with leaders of the Khmer Rouge during his initial capture and later during the evacuation of the French embassy in Phnom Penh.

In his interactions with his captors, he portrays himself as a skillful manipulator and negotiator, when in fact he was merely a fortunate foreign survivor in the path of a tragic era in Cambodian history. Bizot, in fact, seemed to have little or no control over any of the events surrounding him or even his own destiny ... and was more a patsy of the Cambodians than the master manipulator he purports to be in this work. While innocent Cambodians were being murdered, worked to death, and betrayed by their own family and friends ... Bizot complains about his own trivial personal deprivations, such as being forced to eat cold soup. His narrative evokes very little sympathy for his plight ... and he ultimately comes across in the work as an arrogant French colonial who suffered through a shortage of cognac while his idyllic colonial lifestyle came to a sudden end. The irony of the story is that Bizot saves noone but himself and then bemoans the suffering of the Cambodian people that he did so little to alleviate.

This book says little of value in regards to the triumph of the human spirit, the bravery of an individual through adversity, or the depths of the human soul. It is a story of a victim, like so many other victims of the Cambodian Holocaust, who was swept forward in the tides of the bloody revolution of Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge. Spare yourself the agony of suffering through this text ... there are many other books written by or about the Cambodian people who truly lived through this tragedy and deserve to be heard, as opposed to a Westerner's self-serving reflections on his loss of a Cambodia that better suited his fancy.