Don DeLillo, The Body Artist, 2001

Lauren Hartke is a performance artist whose husband, a film director, dies unexpectedly in the company of his first wife. Then at the New England summer house they were renting, a mentally disturbed man appears who has little ability with language but who is somehow channeling her late husband. What is she to make of this? DeLillo extracts extraordinary depth from this simple situation, his post-modern style seeming well-suited to a novel replete with half-finished thoughts and sentences, casual grammatical slips and odd rhythms of speech, culminating in a language that blurs the edges between Hartke and the unknown man. It’s haunting and clever, and DeLillo makes creative use of the in-built flexibility of English that, while being entirely self-conscious, seems to be the right technique to portray a woman who is detached and remote from herself. Recommended as a rather challenging read.  PY

MORE ON DON DeLILLO : WIKIPEDIA

Tew Bunnag, After the Wave, 2005

Tew Bunnag is a relatively new author on the Thai scene, and this collection of six stories are all centred around the 2004 tsunami which devastated Thailand’s west coast. As mostly stories of ordinary people whose lives are disrupted by that extraordinary event, this being Thailand it’s perhaps inevitable that ghosts also make an appearance as a thread that Bunnag uses to subtly link several of the stories: this was the side to his writing that I found the most enjoyable – how the tsunami somehow also became intertwined with the lives of Thailand’s ghosts; also his frequent references to the sea-gypsies known as the Moken whom Bunnag clearly knows quite well. A good collection that’s impossible to find in bookstores outside Thailand but is available from the small press Mettavisions.  PY

MORE ON TEW BUNNAG :  INTERVIEW WITH BK MAGAZINE