A lifetime later, a return to Groslier’s Mekong

Polymath George Groslier’s Mekong River travelogue was a best seller in France in 1931. Eighty-five years later, the work described as ‘stirring poems . . . making us feel all the beauty of a little-known land’ has finally been published in English.

When French novelist, archaeologist, painter, photographer and architect George Groslier boarded a boat in 1929 to document pagodas along 2,000 kilometres of the Mekong River, the travelling polymath did so with an infallible and often self-deprecating sense of humour.

“Me, I am an inexperienced oaf, 70 kilos of flaccid flesh. Every time I have boarded a pirogue [long canoe] . . . I have all but flipped the thing,” wrote a 42-year-old Groslier in the first week of his two-part, months-long, sometimes gruelling mission.

Though Groslier’s 600-page diary would find commercial success in France after its distillation into a travel book in 1931, its English translation, Water and Light: A Travel Journal of the Cambodian Mekong, was only released this February.

The travelogue, published by DatAsia Press, a specialty publisher based in Florida, tells of muddy river banks, jolly monks in dazzling pagodas, dangerous rapids, festive boat races and nighttime bonfires by the Mekong, with exceptional literary weight.

LONG AND COMPLETE ANALYSIS http://www.phnompenhpost.com/post-weekend/lifetime-later-return-grosliers-mekong