Dancing in Cambodia

I loved the first essay in Dancing in Cambodia, At Large in Burma by Amitav Ghosh. The book contains three fine essays, the two of the title and another titled Stories in Stones about Angkor Wat.

Dancing in Cambodia begins ‘On 10 May 1906, at two in the afternoon, a French liner called the Admiral-Kersaint set sail from Saigon carrying a troupe of nearly a hundred classical dancers and musicians from the royal palace at Phnom Penh. They were to stage the first ever performance of Cambodian classical dance in Europe, at the Exposition Coloniale in Marseille.’ Read more:
https://sites.google.com/site/entranceblue/journal-fragments/reviews ( )

Ghosh is here, as elsewhere, eloquent and thoughtful. These short memoir/essays, while narrative and descriptive, are also evocative of both the beauty and terror of Southeast Asia. Pair with a good history of the region. ( )