One of the world’s largest ancient cities lay in the jungles of Southeast Asia in the greater Angkor region located in contemporary Cambodia. This medieval site was home to the Angkor or Khmer Empire from the ninth to 15th centuries. You might be familiar with the famous Angkorian temple, Angkor Wat, one of the largest religious monuments in the world.
But most people don’t realize that Angkor Wat is just one of more than a thousand temples in the greater Angkor region. Our research suggests that this settlement may have been home to between 700,000 and 900,000 people at its height in the 13th century. This means that the population of Angkor was roughly comparable to the almost 1 million people who lived in ancient Rome at its height.
“Two deaths you cannot have and one you cannot avoid.” So goes a Russian saying Mikhail Iossel remembers in his excellent new collection Love Like Water, Love Like Fire. Funny thing about Iossel’s stories of Soviet life, though: they are filled with men and women living second lives, drunks who avoided death (to their distress), and whole families of Soviet citizens who are not killed, not officially, but “disappeared.” Death, in these stories, punctuates life like a question mark.
There’s a melancholy seam of emotion about family life here, as well as a keen eye for the absurdities of workplace culture. Pester’s frame of reference only heightens the surreality.
The Last Migration is original, tragic and haunting. It paints a picture of a future world ruined by self-destructive humanity, unless we urgently act to save our planet. However, while the novel is about loss, it is also about love and hope.