Saturday March 15, 2008
The Guardian
by Milton Osborne
The name Phnom Penh doesn't whisper and scream in literature as does that of Saigon, for all that the Cambodian capital has a darker recent history.
Graham Greene didn't stay there, Norman Lewis did (but failed to have the same feeling for Cambodia as for Thailand), while Pierre Loti, Somerset Maugham and other languid fellow travellers were only in transit en route to Angkor Wat.
André Malraux wrote a sneer about a "land of decay", but then he had been detained after his attempt to smuggle out chunks of temple sculptures for sale in New York. And yet, as described by Milton Osborne, who has known it for 50 years, it does so deserve first-rank writing.
Besides the Khmer Rouge evacuation of the metropolis in 1975 (a dystopian fiction made murderously real), there had been Sihanouk time, mid-50s to 1970, when, in response to Peter O'Toole publicly dissing him after location shooting upriver for the film of Lord Jim, the prince directed movies starring his circle and their Cadillacs. And the only place to stay, the Grand Hotel de Madame Duguet, surely demands a novel of sustained deliquescence.
The Guardian
by Milton Osborne
The name Phnom Penh doesn't whisper and scream in literature as does that of Saigon, for all that the Cambodian capital has a darker recent history.
Graham Greene didn't stay there, Norman Lewis did (but failed to have the same feeling for Cambodia as for Thailand), while Pierre Loti, Somerset Maugham and other languid fellow travellers were only in transit en route to Angkor Wat.
André Malraux wrote a sneer about a "land of decay", but then he had been detained after his attempt to smuggle out chunks of temple sculptures for sale in New York. And yet, as described by Milton Osborne, who has known it for 50 years, it does so deserve first-rank writing.
Besides the Khmer Rouge evacuation of the metropolis in 1975 (a dystopian fiction made murderously real), there had been Sihanouk time, mid-50s to 1970, when, in response to Peter O'Toole publicly dissing him after location shooting upriver for the film of Lord Jim, the prince directed movies starring his circle and their Cadillacs. And the only place to stay, the Grand Hotel de Madame Duguet, surely demands a novel of sustained deliquescence.
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