Tew Bunnag, Fragile Days, 2001

Nine stories that work well together as a cross-section of lives lived in Bangkok, from the poorest to the richest. These are less tales of status and stasis than stories of the different social strata intermixing and encountering each other, such as in ‘The Flower Girl’ in which a street orphan is adopted by a rich widow, or ‘Jeed Finds Her Brother’ in which a country girl finds out the truth about her missing brother’s life in Bangkok. These encounters inevitably leave the characters changed, yet somehow everyone at some point is a victim of the city itself, the Big Mango, for the better as often as for the worse. It’s hard to pick any story that stands out above the rest, although for characterisation the final story ‘Love Heals Tammy’ is the one that puts across best how Thais are prepared to look to the positive and be transformed by it. Bunnag also caps off the stories with a non-fiction epilogue titled ‘An Ode to the City’ in which he spells out his feelings on the ugliness of Bangkok itself, while declaring an undying admiration for the people who would dare to live in such a place. This is a lovely collection.  PY

MORE ON TEW BUNNAG :  INTERVIEW WITH BK MAGAZINE

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

Siriworn Kaewkan, The Murder Case of Tok Imam Storpa Karde, 2006

There are very few novels that explore the separatist terrorism affecting the three small Thai provinces that border Malaysia, and this one, shortlisted for the 2006 SEA Write Award, quickly became required reading that year with an English translation following four years later. So who killed the much-loved imam in the small village of Tanyong Baru, right outside his own mosque? Terrorists or State officials? Soldiers or police? Is there a suspicious connection with a neighbouring Buddhist village? And why are the villagers closing their doors to an actual investigation? The reader’s guess is as good as anyone elses, which indicates the clever structure of this tale of deflections and half-truths that inevitably views the subject from an outsider’s perpective yet at the same time lets the story’s participants speak (seemingly, often less than thruthfully) for themselves. Kaewkan simply provides the necessary pieces to the jigsaw then lets the readers assemble it in a way that indicates there’s an inevitable collective madness going on here. There are a number of possible courses of events discernable if this short novel is read closely, which is easily done in one sitting – just don’t expect a straightforward whodunnit.

Collin Piprell, Bangkok Knights, 1989

Thailand has a boisterous and sometimes shady breed of expat fiction, something with which you take your chances and inevitably court disappointment. Canadian author and journalist Collin Piprell started out writing guide books for Thailand’s diving community then worked his way into getting his short fiction published in the Bangkok Post. These are bar stories, yet their quality may be a cut above the rest in this often seedy sub-genre of world literature because Bangkok Knights has already received three different editions from three different publishers. If so, this collection probably sets a good ‘bar story’ standard: all of them are gently humorous or bittersweet in tone, neither outlandishly sexist nor patronising, and they share a cast of fairly well characterised (if sometimes rather clichéd) expat Western males combined with an assortment of colourful (if also rather clichéd) Thai females. What I expected to find, and certainly did, is that uneasy distrust that often sees them eyeing each other warily over the cultural barricades while still needing each other for various pre-determined selfish reasons, in fact it’s often this cultural frisson that informs each story’s plot.

The first-person narrator of all the stories remains largely invisible throughout except for a couple of episodes, one which describes a journalistic trip up the Maekok river that goes disastrously wrong (in fact the only non-bar story in the collection and probably the best), and the final outing which is an interesting mixture of relationship and identity crises running in parallel, something that probably comes upon any emotionally unattached, long-time expat resident of Thailand. Piprell has also written three novels – I expect I’ll be reading them all.  PY

MORE ON COLLIN PIPRELL : AUTHOR'S WEBSITE

Chart Korbjitti, No Way Out, 1980

A short novel that describes the almost systematic dismantling of a Bangkok family, as a result of the poverty trap they find themselves in when the father tries to take them out of rented accommodation and into a corrugated metal-and-wood shack of their own. Korbjitti is spare with the details, though through the multiple viewpoints of the family he provides more than enough information to give a clear picture of their circumstances while at the same time leaving it to the reader to decide where the blame may lie. A sad but very true book for many, Korbjitti has won two SEA Write Awards for his explorations of Thai social issues that few Westerners get to see, let alone experience.  PY

MORE ON CHART KORBJITTI : WIKIPEDIA

Fa Poonvoralak, The Most Silent School in the World, 2009

While experimental fiction gets as fair a shout in Thailand as anywhere else in the world, as far as I can see (and, given that I don't read Thai, maybe I can’t see far enough) the country isn’t really on the map for wildly imaginative speculative fiction, let alone science fiction, fantasy or slipstream. So when something comes along that is unusual and category-defying it’s rather unexpected, particularly considering that The Most Silent School in the World was also shortlisted for the 2009 SEA Write Award. It’s the story of eight schoolchildren of mixed ages at a riverside school in rural Thailand; they turn up when they want, night or day, there are no teachers, they play games with each other, not a great deal happens that’s different from one day to the next and they’re not being groomed for a life in society. That’s because in our plane of existence they’re not really children at all: they’re the eight Trigrams of Taoist cosmology, given English/Thai names like Water Nam, Mountain Pukao and Sky Fa. Then they are visited by eight more ‘echo children’ from the Moon who are all subtly different, then more children arrive from the rings of Saturn, the Oort Cloud, the Sun and various other places around the solar system. They speculate if their school may in fact be some kind of spaceship. They’ve finally multiplied to sixty-four – the same number of pairings that make up the Hexagrams of the I Ching – and the physical dimensions of their school keep on growing, instantly adding more rooms as new children arrive. How they all interact may be meant to reflect the inherent subtleties of the I Ching’s Hexagrams; although this seems to be the intent it was often difficult to figure out beyond the characters of the children/Trigrams themselves.

All the above is not actually a spoiler as it would have helped to know something of the structure of the book before beginning it. It’s also rather inconclusive, but then this story was written more along ancient Eastern lines than that of a linear, modern Western text, with the analogy of the ‘Silent School’ probably meaning the life situations contained in the I Ching itself, and the physical school representing an expansion of an octagonal ba gua arrangement of Trigrams. This book is both perplexing and entertaining, and for someone who’s long been interested in both creative fiction and the inner working of the I Ching it’s also a rare and valuable find, regrettably one that I doubt will be showing up at many bookstores outside of Thailand.  PY

MORE ON FA POONVORALAK : WIKIPEDIA

Chart Korbjitti, Carrion Floating By, 1987

You’re driving at night and fall asleep at the wheel, triggering a car crash: in Thailand, this makes you fair game for everyone else involved who will claim compensation for injuries, damage and loss of income, and the cost to you now has to be negotiated and bargained. You’re now carrion for the vultures who all want a piece of you, but when you happen to work in advertising, doesn’t this then become tit-for-tat? This is a dryly amusing book and mildly satirical even though it’s deliberately light on laughs. Told throughout in the second person, Korbjitti intended the narrator’s gender to be undetermined but this somehow became lost in translation from Thai to English, with the reader, at key points, necessarily being provided with a male narrator; otherwise, barring a few minor errors in English this is a translation that reads very fluently. I’m getting to understand Korbjitti’s point of view: he’s uncompromisingly socialist, and his books that I’ve read so far have been well-observed and unremittingly mundane in subject matter, yet with an emotional impact reserved for the closing scenes that has so far never failed to hit the mark.  PY

MORE ON CHART KORBJITTI : WIKIPEDIA

Chart Korbjitti, Time, 1993

A Thai film director goes to the theatre to see what has been billed as Bangkok’s most boring play of the year, in which half a dozen elderly women live their usual uneventful day in a care home for the aged. That may sound like a very dull premise for a novel, and perhaps it is, but deliberately so. Time earned Korbjitti his second SEA Write Award, and to find out why means ploughing through two hundred pages of rather mundane dialogue mixed with some minor personal crises. There are some winning passages in which Korbjitti gets people to look at their own lives in relation to what’s being acted out on the stage; these are the novel’s most interesting aspects as the sheer dullness of these ladies’ existence – as people essentially discarded from Thai society – makes for tough reading because there is so little in what they do that will engage a reader. We often don’t expect to encounter such uninteresting everyday activity in a novel let alone on a stage, so it’s only the varieties of circumstantial self-reflection and analysis that Korbjitti puts a few of his characters through that will give Time any value. Does he succeed? Within such a deliberately uneventful book it’s the journey’s end here that matters, and I doubt I will read a book this year that has a better ending. Its conclusion was so unexpectedly moving, as well as being downright clever, that it left me speechless, making me pause for five minutes before I could do anything else. Time may have an empty vacuum at its heart, but it’s a worthwhile and rewarding experience and – after some further introspection – only a superficially hard journey getting there.  PY

MORE ON CHART KORBJITTI : WIKIPEDIA

Bjorn Turmann, The Last Tobacco Shop in the World, 2010

Just occasionally the novels you discover at airports are not your typical airport novels. They tease you with nondescript jacket designs and instead draw you in with a well-written cover blurb. They’re wrapped in cellophane or produced by a very small publishing house, or they come in very limited print runs. In the case of The Last Tobacco Shop in the World, all the above apply.

Just a few chapters into The Last Tobacco Shop in the World it becomes apparent this is an unexpected and original take on the future – one in which natural disasters are created as aphrodisiacs, in which smokers are hunted down and murdered by the state, in which interior lighting has the ability to sense human needs. My interest was sustained for over 300 pages mostly because of the tight and interesting way Turmann has with dialogue, particularly between strangers getting to know each other: they talk obliquely to produce conversations that zig-zag their way to their point. There are also some very neat future ideas in this story, set in the year 2040 on a new island called Jarangwa, a tiny slice of post-tsunami geological apocalyptica thrown up by the Andaman Sea off Thailand in 2004. Anton Brick is a freelance ‘syrup monkey’, chasing down ever-diminishing fringe supplies of oil in Iraq, then while staying in Cambodia he’s offered, and takes, a PR job at the only hotel on Jarangwa, one of the few places on Earth where it’s still entirely legal to smoke tobacco. The rest of the planet is a mess of plagues and worldwide Orwellian governmental forces that have banned love, premarital sex, small firearms (big firearms being harder to conceal) and, of course, smoking. But Anton discovers that the guests at this hotel are an unusually strange crowd including a repentant ex-spammer and a Mongolian ex-prostitute (by far the most interesting and well-drawn character), some with frightening personal ambitions and dangerously complex personalities.

Plot and setting aside, Turmann’s obvious strength is his dialogue. It’s the aspect of this novel that will probably draw the reader completely into it, with a side-effect of making one feel a little trapped inside, Prisoner-like, as one tries to figure out where this small cast of ill-matched characters is heading: occasionally as the reader I felt like the protagonist Anton, a blank slate always being kept a little in the dark and always well out of his depth. This is an enigmatic and slightly twisted novel, more slipstream than science fiction, and it’s also one of the most off-beat books I’ve read for a long time. It kept me reading less for its distinct strangeness, which is actually understated, and more for its promise, which is considerable. It has one obvious geographical error (and a rather unforgivable one as it’s relevant to the plot) which is that a boat cannot get from Cambodia’s Rabbit Island to Phuket unless it circumnavigates the entire Malay Peninsula, a journey that could not be done in a day – for convenience Turmann seems to have somehow relocated Phuket and the Andaman Sea on the other side of Thailand. That problem notwithstanding, as I write there are only 600 copies of Tobacco Shop in the world, but there ought to be plenty more as in my humble opinion this novel deserves the interest of a bigger publisher.

Jane Vejjajiva, The Happiness of Kati, 2003

Kati is a nine year-old Thai girl from Ayutthaya whose hospital-bound mother is dying of Motor Neurone Disease, and the story charts her upbringing by her grandparents and how she connects to the world immediately around her and beyond, including how she chooses to deal with the possibility of reconnecting with her estranged father. The setting is unashamedly, comfortably middle class and presents an idealistic, almost perfect environment for Kati that cushions her separation from both her parents, and this blunts the story somewhat although it’s still undoubtedly realistic. The author Vejjajiva is clearly sticking to the strata with which she’s most familiar: herself cerebral palsied and wheelchair-bound, and apart from running a Thai publishing agency and translation bureau her writing also won her Thailand’s 2006 SEAWrite Award (two years before her brother became the country’s Prime Minister). The Happiness of Kati has also been translated into six languages with a Thai film adaptation released early in 2009. This gentle story also illustrates how Thai extended families can function in more close-knit ways than they do in the West. Recommended.  PY

MORE ON JANE VEJJAJIVA :  WIKIPEDIA

Khammaan Khonkhai, The Teachers of Mad Dog Swamp, 1978

There are pitifully few fiction books available in English that function as Thai examinations of Thai identity, but this is one of the more famous. Sompong Palasoon (under his pen name Khammaan Khonkhai) began it as a film script, filmed as Khru Ban-Nork (‘Rural Teachers’), and the book came later with its more colourful title being used for the English translation. Set in a jungle village in Thailand’s far north-east, it has to be said this isn’t a gripping read so much as an ethnographically interesting one: little happens in 300 pages apart from a minor teacher/pupil scandal, some celebrations about the building of a new classroom and the discovery and consequences of an illegal timber trade, but, as the translator Gehan Wijeyewarnede says, “the author sets out to describe the way of life of a poor village folk of a remote area of the northeastern region ... He details their speech, their economy, their technology, their festivals and their food ... He glories in the environment in which they live, the cycle of seasons, their knowledge and adaptation to it.” The characterisation is mostly well done if a little on the shallow side, and this kind of story is often more familar to Western readers when played out in an African context, and indeed the kinds of dramas described seemed rather continentally interchangeable as well. This was first published by an academic press, and is still a great book for reference if you want the minutiae of daily life in Thailand’s remote north-east.  PY

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John Burdett, Bangkok Eight, 2003

Serious novels about modern Bangkok are always worth discovering, and this becomes a must-read given the glowing quotes (Deaver, Ellroy, Hiaasen...) that line all four sides of its front and back covers. John Burdett has gone so far under the skin of the city – and into the Thai mindset – that the rather straightforward whodunnit of a US Marine killed in a car full of snakes ends up playing a definite second string to the Buddhist prerogatives that give this book a unique direction. It is particularly well researched from the bizarre opening murder scene to the strange karmic resolution, and Burdett’s writing throughout is genuinely grown-up, multi-faceted and often darkly comic with an almost science fictional sensibility. There’s also a distinct avoidance of the more predictable clichés when dealing with Bangkok’s sex industry which forms a large part of this story’s background, giving it a level of authenticity than one might not reasonably expect from a farang author. Excellent.  PY

MORE ON JOHN BURDETT : AUTHOR'S WEBSITE  |  WIKIPEDIA

S.P. Somtow, The Other City of Angels, 2001

A dark comedy set in 1990s Bangkok that Somtow wrote as a cliff-hanging serial for Thailand’s The Nation newspaper, directly based on the tale of Bluebeard. Several times divorced Jude Abramowitz is more-or-less kidnapped by marriage from her Californian lifestyle and thrown headlong into some over-the-top Bangkok high society decadence, with a murder mystery to solve along the way. It features at least one real-life character, the food critic Bob Halliday (who also appears in several more of Somtow’s stories), but beyond that any connection to the real world is deliberately suspect. Probably written with a predominantly female audience in mind it readily skims between genres, from Californian chick lit to whodunnit to supernatural thriller, all ending bizarrely in a fit of science fiction fury. For male readers it has its moments too but is best regarded as a kind of lightweight antidote to John Burdett’s Bangkok Eight, which didn’t contain nearly as much wisecracking in the face of death.  PY

MORE ON SOMTOW SUCHARITKUL :  AUTHOR'S WEBSITE  |  FACEBOOK  |  WIKIPEDIA

Rattawut Lapcharoensap, Sightseeing, 2004

A lively and colourful collection of stories of everyday Thai life, all set in either Bangkok or the beaches of Thailand, where the demands of Western tourism define the lives of some of the disenfranchised locals. Lapcharoensap, an Americanised Thai, writes in such a refreshing and uncomplicated way that even the worst fates to befall his colourful characters are somehow given a redeeming twist, portraying his people as unremittingly optimistic in the face of considerable personal adversity. One down side is that several stories are left open-ended and feel like the opening chapters of unfinished novels, nevertheless, he’s clearly a very promising writer to watch.  PY

S.P. Somtow, Dragon’s Fin Soup, 2002

Theodore Sturgeon once called Somtow “One of the most gifted masters of colour and spectacle”, though reluctant about being labelled an ‘ethnic’ writer he long resisted writing creative fiction about Thailand. It was Fred Pohl who convinced him otherwise. Several stories in this collection of eight are notable: the truly excellent ‘The Bird Catcher’ won the World Fantasy Award for best short story, ‘Dragon’s Fin Soup’ has been optioned for a film by Japanese cult director Takashi Miike, and there is also the notably good virtual reality caper ‘The Last Time I Died in Venice’. For the most part Somtow’s preference for horror comes through as his strongest suit, and his cultural schizophrenia means he can effectively translate some distinctly Thai supernaturalities into some very well-written and crystal clear English. Recommended.  PY

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Graham Joyce, Smoking Poppy, 2001

A lonely and bitter Englishman goes to Chiang Mai in search of his daughter who is jailed on drug-smuggling charges, but is led further on a journey into the mysterious, spirit-haunted world of Thailand’s interior. Graham Joyce writes with a kind of contemporary, knowing, middle-aged English freshness; all the characters are sufficiently well-drawn to come alive vividly in the reader’s mind and the narrator never really loses his jaded cynicism throughout, though he finally succumbs to a rather belated coming-of-age as a proper parent to his two estranged twenty-something kids. An excellent book, one I would like to re-read in a few years.   PY