The Anarchist

In two incendiary novellas, Soth Polin dissects the anatomy of extremity. In the sweltering heat of 1960s Phnom Penh, a young history teacher drifts from brothels to floating houses, from philosophical fury to erotic delirium. Western-educated but estranged from his own land and language, he careens between metaphysical despair and violent desire, haunted by an impossible love and dreams that bleed into waking life. As memory and hallucination merge, the line between thought and act dissolves entirely. In Paris, an exiled journalist composes a fevered confession. Virak believes his reporting helped propel Cambodia toward the Khmer Rouge – that his zeal to expose political rot accelerated his country’s collapse and descent into terror. Addressing an unnamed ‘little English girl’ who may be witness or illusion, he retraces his journey from naïve youth to embattled newsman, as Phnom Penh dances on the brink. Ruthless, visionary, darkly comic, Soth Polin’s twin tales of upheaval shatter the boundaries between testimony and madness, philosophy and profanity, love and annihilation. Claustrophobic and visceral, shot through with fierce intelligence, The Anarchist is a portrait of consciousness pushed to its limits, a descent into the vortex where desire meets oblivion, and where freedom reveals itself as the most terrifying burden of all. A modern classic of Cambodian literature, this English translation brings to light one of the most daring, unflinching accounts of political passion and self-destruction written in the shadow of genocide.