Review
An Ordinary Story (And Others Less So)
translated by Marcel Barang
2010
Howling Books
Review by Peter Young in The Thai Literary Supplement #9 (June 2017).
This collection acts as a small retrospective of Korbjitti’s short fiction from 1981 to 2006. The title novella has a neat and well thought out first-person perspective, that of a deliberately detached man living in a Bangkok apartment in which another tenant is dying of breast cancer. He’s an awkward and rather anti-social type, offering constant justifications for his remote and self-prescribed ‘spectator’ status, but as the story progresses and the interactions with other tenants mount up the reader is able discern why he feels he has to be that way, even though it does not make him especially likeable. It’s also an interesting example of an author trying to shift a reader’s perspective on his story’s protagonist.
Korbjitti is always rigorous in thinking through the message of his stories, but at times he can be more experimental. ‘Disappearance’ is a case in point, half composed of emails concerning a man’s unexplained vanishing. I was also pleased to find some genre on the menu, notably with ‘Our Future’ which gives free and disturbing reign to what children would do if their toy guns were real and instead loaded with live ammunition. By far the most visceral story is ‘The Personal Knife’, one of the most disturbing stories of cannibalism you may ever read and one in which Korbjitti again lets you discern his politics by letting you see which strata of society are the bad guys. The best story of all for me was ‘Shamgri-La’, in which a grandfather who had long ago inexplicably disappeared and was presumed dead returns to his family with a story of living among a community of ghosts in a cemetery. It feels like a traditional ghost story, but there are Asian ingredients that make the recipe intoxicating.