Jon Swain, who wrote “Rivers of Time: A Memoir of Vietnam”, also lived through the Khmer Rouge take-over, and spent a long time in Indochina as foreign correspondent, I think for AFP. He writes a curiously beautiful prose about, well, the war in all its atrocities. If you need to read about this war, try this one. ( )

The subtitle appears only on the paperback edition. It's inaccurate since much of this memoir concerns Cambodia.

Swain is one of the reporters who covered the fall of Phnom Penh in the film The Killing Fields. His was the spare passport that the group unsuccessfully tried to counterfeit for Dith Pran. I've read a number of reviews that blast this account of Swain's time in Southeast Asia; most accuse him of admiring the Khmer Rouge (which is not supported by this text), of not writing a complete history (which is not the intention of this book), and/or of being a sybarite whose recollections are primarily of the opium and sex he enjoyed in the region. While it's true that he is nostalgic for his quondam pleasures, I saw very clearly that he contrasts his younger and more mature perspectives, that he counters the hedonism and cynicism of the pre-war period with the wars' horrific effects, and that what he longs for (as in so many narratives of transition) is an imagined gentleness and naivite. I'm certainly a feminist and have my own concerns about the genre of the war narrative as told by men, in which women are only gruff authorities, prostitutes, or protective mothers. However, Swain's narrative is much more complex than that, and often succeeds in showing the transformation of peoples and countries as well as of Swain himself. ( )

Da jeg plukket opp denne boken på flyplassen i Phnom Penh trodde jeg at jeg skulle lese en bok om å reise langs Mekong-elven. En fin tittel, et omslag som bekreftet tittelen, men jeg tok feil. River of Time handler mer om krigsreporteren Jon Swain, om det å være journalist under en krig, og om det å takle det å leve livet på en knivsegg og bevare fatningen mens verden rundt deg faller i grus.
Selv om bokens ramme er Mekong-elven og Indokina, så er dette ikke en reiseskildring, men en selvbiografi hvor Jon Swain, Sunday TImes-journalist lever gjennom Vietnam-krigen og Røde Khmers overtagelse av Phnom Penh, og om hvordan dette farget Jon Swains forhold til Indokina. Kapitellet om overtagelsen av Phnom Penh er noe av det mest rørende og sterke jeg har lest fra Kambodsja - og der er det mye rørende lesestoff, mens boken spesielt mot slutten tenderer til å bli litt vel mye navlebeskuelse. Likevel er dette en bok jeg anbefaler de aller fleste som har et forhold til Kambodsja, Indokina, journalistikk og reiser å lese. ( )