It is not easy to do justice in a necessarily concise review to a tour de force of a book such as Michael Falser's Angkor Wat, with its two large-format volumes totaling 1,150 pages (printed in small typeface) and containing more than 1,400 illustrations, mostly black-and-white but also with color plates at the end of each volume. Falser examines the material and discursive configuration of the religious monument of Angkor Wat in Cambodia by means of archaeological, curatorial, and representational strategies as a world-renowned architectural masterpiece and key symbol of Khmer identity since the late nineteenth century. To investigate these strategies, Falser employs the analytical lenses of critical theory, postcolonial studies, and heritage studies (or, better, “critical” heritage studies, as per the recently adopted qualification).Built in the second quarter of the twelfth century as a cosmic temple dedicated to Shiva and subsequently turned into a Buddhist monastery at the century's end, Angkor Wat (angkor is the transcription of the Sanskrit term nagara, “royal capital”; wat is vernacular for “monastery”) has fascinated Westerners since they first became aware of it in the early 1860s, around the time France annexed the kingdom of Cambodia as a protectorate within the Indochinese Union (a composite colonial state also comprising Vietnam and Laos). By the 1930s, Angkor Wat was canonized by scholars affiliated with the École Française d'Extrême-Orient as the epitome of classical Khmer architecture (the Western art historical notion of “classical” denoting a stage of perfection bound to degenerate into allegedly inflated styles). Since 1954, Angkor Wat's silhouette has featured on the flags adopted by succeeding incarnations of the postcolonial Cambodian state, even as French conservators retained authority over the site until the early 1970s. Angkor Wat's grandeur was well suited to the high imperial age, at a time when Europeans undertook the study and conservation of the major historical monuments located in colonized territories. Indeed, the French restoration of Angkor Wat and Angkor's other monuments, such as the Bayon and the Baphuon, was anticipated by British interventions on the Mahabodhi Temple in Bodhgaya and those by the Dutch at Borobudur in Java. After the devastation suffered by Cambodia in the 1970s, which witnessed American carpet bombing, civil war, and the Khmer Rouge's reign of terror (1975–79), followed by arduous recovery in the 1980s under a Vietnam-backed regime, since the 1990s Angkor Wat has regained global visibility as a tourist destination, with the typical mix of beneficial and detrimental results (unlike many iconic monuments, Angkor Wat is not located in or close to the national capital, but in Cambodia's western region).As the book's bibliography shows, there is a considerable Western literature (mostly, though not only, in French) on Angkor Wat and Khmer art generally, which includes scholarly and popular books, articles in academic journals and illustrated magazines, and museum guidebooks and exhibition catalogues, in addition to the surveys and reports produced by colonial, national, and international conservation agencies, as well as by individual experts. Falser's careful consideration of a large number of written and visual documents, along with secondary works, gives his analysis exceptional depth; the book's vast iconographic apparatus in particular is an integral aspect of the author's archival research and his methodology as an architectural historian. Falser premises the goal of tracing “Angkor Wat's ‘trans-cultural’ trajectory” over the time span 1860–2010 on the reconsideration of “our explanatory terms to describe the involved transfer-translation operations” (1:42), which produced “two twinned archaeological versions of Angkor (Wat) in the sense of Foucault's ‘enacted utopias,’ in our case of cultural heritage” (2:8). The study is informed conceptually by the notion, adapted from literary theory, of translation as a practice generative of new versions of a text—or, in this case, artifact—that in turn modify the original text (1:39–43). But aside from this conceptual framework, it is analytically productive to consider the sculptural and architectural replicas of Khmer monuments exhibited in France (both permanent and ephemeral, faithful and pastiche) and the on-site conservative and reconstructive interventions as two parallel vectors of the same project of heritage making, or “patrimonialization” (a French lexical loan employed by Falser). At the same time, distinct albeit interfacing disciplinary concerns dominate the two volumes: those of museology and of art and architectural history and criticism in volume 1; and those of architectural conservation and heritage studies in volume 2.Volume 1, Angkor in France, opens with a long introduction that establishes the study's conceptual framework and introduces the contents of both volumes. The following eight chapters examine the representational history of Angkor's monuments through architectural drawings, artists’ sketches, and, above all, plaster casts and architectural replicas made for museums and colonial and international exhibitions, moving chronologically from the Mekong Mission of 1866 (the first French exploration of western Cambodia after naturalist Henri Mouhot's sighting of Angkor Wat in 1860) to the 1937 Paris Exposition Universelle (where the Soviet and German pavilions stood ominously one against the other ahead of World War II). The epilogue considers the additional inheritance claims by India, whose Hindu architecture represents the prototype of, and model for, Angkor Wat, as well as by Thailand, whose centuries-long suzerainty over western Cambodia ceased only in 1907 as a result of an unequal treaty with France. In volume 2, Angkor in Cambodia, Falser's focus shifts to the actual monumental site. Chapters 9 to 12 (numeration carries on from volume 1) discuss, respectively, the creation and management of the Angkor Archaeological Park during the temporal arc 1907–70, the postcolonial reclaiming of Angkor Wat and of the legacy of the Angkorian empire under King Norodom Sihanouk's leadership (1953–70), the temple's spoliation during the domestic strife of the 1970s and 1980s, and its rise to conservation cause célèbre in the early 1990s, when Angkor Wat garnered international support and inscription on the UNESCO World Heritage List. An extended epilogue amounting to an additional chapter examines the management of Angkor Wat as a World Heritage Site since 1992.Even though exhibits centering on French Indochina have been studied previously, Falser marshals an unprecedented amount of written and visual sources in volume 1. The aesthetic, material, technical, and spatial aspects of even minor museological collections and colonial exhibitions, along with the main exhibition venues in Paris and Marseille, are examined in minute, even overwhelming detail from a theoretically informed perspective that delineates an escalation in dimensions, from single architectural elements to the integral full-scale replica of Angkor Wat built in 1931. Intriguing is the—alas, too brief—discussion of the condemnation of Cambodian displays by French leftist intellectuals and anticolonial activists (1:332–34). But Falser's most valuable contribution, dealing with the actual monumental site, is found in volume 2. This includes his exemplary discussion of anastylosis in chapter 9. First tested by the Dutch at Borobudur in the early 1900s, this technique was used extensively by French conservators to shape their “utopia of cultural heritage” at the Angkor Archaeological Park. Of great value to readers is also the detailed analysis Falser provides in chapters 10 and 11 concerning the ideological mobilization of Angkor by the succeeding state entities that held power from 1953 to 1993, and the way shifting foreign relations informed heritage diplomacy. Falser shows that the rhetoric of Angkor as heritage of humanity championed by UNESCO actually originated at the time of the U.S.-installed Khmer Republic (1970–75) that forced Sihanouk into exile. Moreover, the limited diplomatic relations of the People's Republic of Kampuchea, which replaced the Khmer Rouge's Democratic Kampuchea, opened the way for Asian states such as India and Japan, as well as socialist Poland, to provide technical and financial support for conservation in the 1980s, when the ousted Khmer Rouge exploited their ability to jeopardize access to Angkor from their remaining strongholds along the border with Thailand.In addition to praise for his painstaking research, Falser deserves recognition for considering comparatively analogous colonial cases of architectural conservation and representation, and for contextualizing historically the various stages in the patrimonialization of Angkor. One can also sympathize with his polemic against the “neo-colonial dispossession strategy against Cambodia's own claim to manage Angkor Park independently” (2:401)—a strategy deployed since the 1990s through a plethora of international cooperation projects in which France is, once again, a key national player, along with Japan. In stigmatizing the reproduction of the colonial rhetoric of tutelage in the “Salvaging Angkor” campaigns of the past thirty years, the author could have drawn a parallel with the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, a hybrid body comprising foreign and Cambodian lawyers and prosecutors that was set up in the early 2000s on the recommendation of the United Nations to put the Khmer Rouge leaders on trial in accordance with international legal standards of independence and impartiality. Following the school of thought inaugurated by Robert Hewison's The Heritage Industry (1987), Falser's indictment of the Angkor World Heritage Site as a “cultural heritage theme park … where over-restored temple sites were now presented, like picture-perfect pavilions in universal and colonial exhibitions, by various national (but not Cambodian) teams” (2:403) may well be justified from the standpoint of current architectural conservation, and even of the political economy of international cooperation, but may overlook the economic importance of the combined enhancement and exploitation (or mise en valeur) of Angkor for postconflict Cambodia.1I come thus to the critical remarks. Mirroring the scale of its subject, Falser's monumental study embodies a totalizing, encyclopedic idea of knowledge that is at odds with the author's own deconstructionist position—a position based on close observance of Foucauldian dogmas and postcolonial pieties that occasionally stiffens into an intellectual cliché. Falser, who seems to share an obsession with Angkor Wat with the colonial scholars he condemns, paradoxically magnifies French agency in his attempt to expose its epistemological and ideological biases while conversely undervaluing local knowledge and cultural imagination. The intentionally ephemeral nature of most of the colonial artifacts examined in volume 1—inherently different in this from the actual Khmer monuments—cannot be forgotten in the evaluation of their cultural, artistic, and ideological significance. The nationalist iconization of Angkor Wat by Sihanouk and the Khmer Rouge is scrupulously examined in volume 2, even though Falser's analysis is based on French-language documents that catered mainly to an international audience rather than a domestic one. The issue of the social memory of Angkor Wat possessed by Cambodian refugees in the 1990s is briefly addressed in a largely visual section (2:299–304). Overall, however, little is said about the social perception of Angkor Wat as an identitarian symbol in both colonial and postcolonial Cambodia among local intellectuals who expressed their views in the vernacular (the bibliography contains no sources in Khmer).The very scale of the book also poses a problem, given that reading it from start to end is no mean task. Further, its superior production unfortunately omitted much-needed copyediting. The laborious prose, replete with jargon and repetitions as well as lexical blunders and syntactical aberrations (not to mention the abuse of French terms for which direct English equivalents exist), does not help the reader negotiate the book's exceptional length. Even the chapter-by-chapter summaries in the “Findings and Conclusions” sections at the ends of both volumes are longwinded. Editing oversights include some glaring typos (e.g., “Camodia” in the title line of volume 2's table of contents), inconsistent and often incorrect (according to predominant Anglo-American editorial styles) italicization of the names of French organizations, and, conversely, a perplexing avoidance of italics in the titles of books and journals listed in the bibliography.To sum up, Falser's Angkor Wat is unquestionably the fruit of much dedication and thorough field and archival research in Cambodia, Thailand, France, and Germany. Despite its flaws and intimidating length, it is a remarkable work of scholarship. Scholars interested in the politics of heritage, museology, and the global history of architecture, as well as the cultural history of Cambodia, will find much valuable information in this book, presuming they can afford a copy (the dimensions and copious illustrations justify the hefty list price, which is the same for the hardcover and electronic editions) and are determined enough to read it through.