 Book Reviews
with Robin Osborne
Sightseeing
By Rattawut Lapcharoensap
Picador $22.00
 This
25-year old Thai author is already being dubbed a writing sensation on the strength
of his debut book, a short collection of seven short stories set in the land he
only sometimes calls home.
Chicago-born, Bangkok-raised Rattawut Lapcharoensap gained a US
masters degree in creative writing and now holds a fellowship in
the School of American Studies at the University of East Anglia,
UK, which presumably accounts for the overly American flavour of
his language, the only irritant in an excellent work of fiction.
His attractively presented paperback might reek of the exotic Orient
but it gives no foretaste that the tales within are set in the seedy,
violent, often corrupt world of the Thai underclasses - the Thailand
tourists seldom glimpse.
His skill lies in humanising the inhabitants and enabling the foreign
reader to easily identify with these quirky tales of good and evil.
He begins with the beach resorts visited by farangs (foreigners)
- 'The Italians like pad thai, its affinity with spaghetti,' while
Americans 'pretend to like... grilled prawns or the occasional curry
but twice a week they need their culinary comforts, their hamburgers
and their pizzas. They're also the worst drunks.'
The narrator's mother says foreigners seek 'pussy and elephants'
and despite the country's temples, floating markets and silk-weaving
cooperatives, 'all they really want is to ride some hulking gray
beast like a bunch of wildmen and pant over girls and to lie there
half-dead getting skin cancer on the beach during the time in between.'
His mother doesn't want him 'bonking a farang' because long ago
she had bonked one herself, 'against the wishes of her own parents,
and all she got for her trouble was a broken heart and me in return.'
One story is set in a seedy brothel, Café Lovely, visited
by a young Thai man and his little brother who yearns to ride the
family motorbike, another tells of a mother buying fake Armani sunglasses,
'horn-rimmed, purple-rhinestoned', to protect her failing eyes on
a daytrip to an island.
Standouts are Priscilla the Cambodian, a disturbing tale of the
prejudice faced by refugee Cambodians in urban Thai society, and
Cockfighting, about a man who ruins his family by betting against
local gangsters.
"Find a new hobby," urges the man's wife, "Collect
stamps. Raise carp. Exercise... Do something civilized for once."
But Papa just laughed it off.'
Not much laughter comes with these slices of Thai life but Rattawut
is a writer bound for success.
- Books reviewed are available at Book Warehouse, Keen Street, Lismore.
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