He had promised him: he would write a book on his history. Guillaume Sire has kept his word. How else can you do when you come across, in New York, a strange and magnificent Cambodian, dazzling homeless man earning a living as he can and with what he has left: an extraordinary talent for chess. He plays with passers-by, wins every time and takes a few dollars. And then, he confides in his life. An unimaginable life that deserved so much to be told.
Read also: The martyrdom of Cambodia
It starts in Phnom Penh. The young Saravouth Inn grew up there in a Catholic family: a civil servant father, a French teacher mother, and a little sister Daria, gifted and whimsical. We are in 1971, he is 11 years old and invented an "inner kingdom" , a very subtle imaginary country in which he escapes. Because the outside world is less radiant. The civil war is raging and may not spare them. But Saravouth does not want to believe it and listens with passion to his mother to read him The Odyssey , Peter Pan or the poems of René Char. An idyllic atmosphere that has lasted too long. The Inn family is arrested. The child is found, inanimate, by an old woman in the middle of nowhere. But where is his family?
Clmann-Levy
Then begins the second life of Saravouth, that where he decides to go in search of his own. Tirelessly, despite the immense risks, the incredible violence of bloodthirsty soldiers of all stripes, despite the miles to go, he did not give up. He must find his parents and his sister. He never believes in the worst, never imagines them dead, they are somewhere and are also looking for him. The boy's quest is heartbreaking because it is unrealistic and suddenly we want to believe it. Saravouth is growing up too fast and has all the courage. He looks at his beautiful country, the one whose smells, flowers, fruits he loved so much, becoming a mass grave, but he persists again and again in rummaging, interrogating, and trying to return to where his parents may have returned : at their home.
Residents sentenced to certain death
"You have to tremble to grow up," said his mother. This verse by René Char does not leave Saravouth. Do not leave the reader either. Because with this striking novel, and despite the poetic horror, Guillaume Sire succeeded in carrying out his project by recounting as a child what the worst man has done: making a little boy's hell hell and that of a country. It recalls the courage of the doctors, nurses and priests who remained in Cambodia to care for - and sometimes save - residents condemned to certain death. It also tells of a child's obstinacy, his loneliness, his guilt for being alive. Saravouth, like thousands of others left behind, will probably never recover from this nightmare.
There remains for this magnificent hero the tenacious memory of the books read almost fifty years earlier. Today in Union Square, when we meet the gaze of Saravouth, the one for whom so many unanswered questions remain, he inevitably asks: " Have you read The Odyssey?"
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