UN Pélerin D'angkor

A Frenchman spends thirty-five years dreaming of Angkor before finally making the pilgrimage. As a child, he encountered the temple's ruins in his family's collection of exotic treasures and was never the same. Now a man in Saigon, haunted by memories of his dead brother and his own vanished youth, he journeys through the lush and dangerous landscape of Vietnam toward a destination that may exist more in imagination than reality. Loti's prose is impossibly sensory: the thick humidity, the perfume of jasmine, the sound of temple stones breathing beneath strangling vines. But this is no mere travelogue. It is an elegy for childhood wonder, for colonial dreams, for the empires that built temples and the time that unmakes them. The protagonist wonders whether the Angkor he finds will match the Angkor that has haunted him, and what it means to finally arrive at a dream.