Astrid Hawk
An incredibly dark, gritty, nihilistic set of vignettes into lower-class life and struggle in Bangkok in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. The summary describes this as a set of interconnected stories following 3 families (and some reviewers parrot this description) - this is misleading and makes me think that neither the marketer/publisher nor the reviewers actually read the book cover to cover.
These are not so much "stories", with actual plot and a beginning, progression, and resolution, as they are viscerally detailed glimpses into various characters' lives. You have to be ready for them to end "artistically" - maybe in the middle of the action if there is any, or sometimes just with an ambiguous inconclusive stop.
It's also tough to count them as following 3 "families" when there are actually many different families involved here (including some orphans), and for most of them we only follow one representative of each family or group. The characters do interact with each other, so there are some tie-ins across the different stories, but the different glimpses we get never tell any one character's story or life linearly from beginning to end.
We get the most "stories" about Nam, who is a character in the opening three stories - the daughter of a school teacher in a southern rural region of Thailand who, finding herself orphaned before she's able to get a secondary education or start a career, moves to Bangkok and makes choices that end up directing her into an unhappy future, and her daughter Lara. What I found most interesting about this is that we follow Nam in half or more of the stories, but we never once have a chapter from Nam's own perspective - her story is entirely told through other people.
The vignettes portray different forms of survival across a set of characters with varying backgrounds - survival in the face of misogyny, classism, economic depression, racism, ethnic bigotry, etc. I didn't find a single one of the characters lovable; while some were downright violent and evil, most of the others were unlikeable due to being self-destructive or immorally pragmatic. I felt an acute level of discomfort reading the first few chapters, a feeling that gradually numbed to a pervasive disappointment or sadness as the chapters went on and it was clear that no one ever had a happy ending or made "good" choices (or even had "good" choices available to them). While I doubt I will want to read this again, I think it'll stick with me for a long time, and it brought to life a much grittier side of Bangkok (and aspects of Thai culture in general) than what I've seen as a "farang". I think that's the mark of a good work of fiction.
An incredibly dark, gritty, nihilistic set of vignettes into lower-class life and struggle in Bangkok in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. The summary describes this as a set of interconnected stories following 3 families (and some reviewers parrot this description) - this is misleading and makes me think that neither the marketer/publisher nor the reviewers actually read the book cover to cover.
These are not so much "stories", with actual plot and a beginning, progression, and resolution, as they are viscerally detailed glimpses into various characters' lives. You have to be ready for them to end "artistically" - maybe in the middle of the action if there is any, or sometimes just with an ambiguous inconclusive stop.
It's also tough to count them as following 3 "families" when there are actually many different families involved here (including some orphans), and for most of them we only follow one representative of each family or group. The characters do interact with each other, so there are some tie-ins across the different stories, but the different glimpses we get never tell any one character's story or life linearly from beginning to end.
We get the most "stories" about Nam, who is a character in the opening three stories - the daughter of a school teacher in a southern rural region of Thailand who, finding herself orphaned before she's able to get a secondary education or start a career, moves to Bangkok and makes choices that end up directing her into an unhappy future, and her daughter Lara. What I found most interesting about this is that we follow Nam in half or more of the stories, but we never once have a chapter from Nam's own perspective - her story is entirely told through other people.
The vignettes portray different forms of survival across a set of characters with varying backgrounds - survival in the face of misogyny, classism, economic depression, racism, ethnic bigotry, etc. I didn't find a single one of the characters lovable; while some were downright violent and evil, most of the others were unlikeable due to being self-destructive or immorally pragmatic. I felt an acute level of discomfort reading the first few chapters, a feeling that gradually numbed to a pervasive disappointment or sadness as the chapters went on and it was clear that no one ever had a happy ending or made "good" choices (or even had "good" choices available to them). While I doubt I will want to read this again, I think it'll stick with me for a long time, and it brought to life a much grittier side of Bangkok (and aspects of Thai culture in general) than what I've seen as a "farang". I think that's the mark of a good work of fiction.