Review
The Flight of Rart Rart Eikkatheit’s Three Worlds
unknown first year of publication
translated by Marcel Barang
Thai Fiction
Review by Peter Young in The Thai Literary Supplement #6 (September 2016).
The title of this rather stunning novella uses a typographic idiosyncrasy employed in the text, which has paragraphs struck through to show paths not taken. Rart Eikkatheit is either an artist who wants to be braver than he is, an under-employed soldier with a death fetish, or a pimp with a violent streak. Maybe he’s all three, as these three characters, all with the same name, cross paths in events driven by Thai political turmoil over the space of nineteen years and, somehow, they recognise each other for who they are: the same person. With each story told you get the point of view and all the things Rart wishes he had done. You get a mind-twisting conundrum told at a relentless pace that doesn’t let up. You get questions about identity that necessarily go unanswered, because to answer them would be to have no story. I’m full of admiration for this baffling yet attractive piece of speculative fiction that does things I’ve never (quite) seen done before, and it certainly deserves a wider international readership. This is another publication deserving of a paper edition because for now it’s available as PDF only.