Sightseeing

Rating:
Summary: It's simple: I'm glad I bought this book.
Review: Featured in ELLE January 2005's "Must Read" section is Chicago-born, Bankok-raised Rattawut Lapcharoensap's debut "Sightseeing." In this ingenious collection of six short stories and a concluding novella, my personal favorites are "Draft Day," "Priscilla the Cambodian" and that novella "Cockfighther." A gifted young author right in his mid-20s, Lapcharoensap "de-exoticizes" the country of his upbringing. With its detailed eye for everything, from the simplest actions to the truest human mannerisms and behavior, along with brilliant and believable plots, "Sightseeing" fed me in a way the junkfood I usually waste my money on never could. I finished this keeper of a book feeling just a little more diversely- and well-read and satisfied than I'd been before I'd bought it.

As a wonderful bonus, keep an eye out for the appearance of the non-Thai Asians and what they're like (how they've been depicted); namely the ferocious but good-natured title character of "Priscilla the Cambodian" and a somewhat mysterious Filipino visitor named Ramon in their respective stories.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent Stories
Review: I have to admit, I have little patience for short story collection. I start many only to put them down half-way through the first story, disappointed. Sightseeing, however, is a different, er, story. From the first story in the collection, Farangs, I was hooked. These are well-written, wonderfully evocative stories that I enjoyed reading very much. Rattawut Lapcharoensap is the kind of short story author I hope very much will gives us more stories and perhaps novels. Enjoy.

Rating:
Summary: Valuable look at little-known culture
Review: Sadly, Thailand was much in the news in early 2005 because of the tsunami disaster, but the country is usually written about mainly from a tourist's perpsective, a la "The Beach." "Sightseeing" is a great answer to the travelogues, taking the viewpoint of a series of younger Thais in a modernizing and class-riven society. Like "Bangkok 8" it's a fascinating look at a dynamic and rapidly changing nation, but "Sightseeing" also suffers from the writer's inexperience. The stories are a bit repetitive and seem to have an unhealthy obsession with mother figures, typical of unpolished collections from young writers. But despite the flaws, "Sightseeing" is definitely worth buying for a look at a country we unfortunately hear little about except when disaster strikes.

Rating:
Summary: A Triumphant Debut
Review: What an extraordinary collection of seven fine pieces. Set in Thailand, the narratives are honest, believable, and fresh. They depict a modern tropical world that is an often uncomfortable amalgam of western and other foreign cultures. The ugliness of this amalgam is most apparent in the lead story, "Farangs," and in "Priscilla the Cambodian," where cultures collide, and the result is both comic and violent. In "At the Cafe Lovely," "Draft Day," and "Sightseeing," the emotional ties of family and friendship are tested, and because the author enriches these stories with wonderfully observed details and authentic feeling, we are enlisted into these dramas and feel their pull. The same can be said of "Don't Let Me Die in This Place," but here the narrator is an elderly American who has come to Thailand after suffering a stroke. He is there to be cared for by his son and mysteriously foreign Thai daughter in law. This American character grows in understanding right before our eyes, and we also feel his struggle to enjoy living even when the odds are so heavily stacked against him. The final story, a novella called "Cockfighter," really showcases the author's talents. Here a hard-working family, as seen through the eyes of an adolescent girl, is almost destroyed when her father challenges the mad tyranny of a local young thug. That madness is rampant in a community "where words ... didn't mean a thing: right or wrong, left or right, up or down, inside or outside--our people didn't speak that kind of language." And in another passage, the narrator sat on her bed, and in her frustration "watched the shadows list back and forth across the floor." Although the ending to this novella is forced, the rest of the piece is original and well written. But my favorite of these stories is "At the Cafe Lovely," where the tenderness of brotherly love, in all its ambiguous subtleties, is expertly painted.
Read this book. It's sharp, quick, and memorable.