Review
Marcel Barang, ed.
2009
translated by Marcel Barang
ThaiFiction
Review by Peter Young in The White Notebooks #8 (2017).
Marcel Barang issued annual anthologies of translated Thai short fiction between 2009 and 2014, the first having nine stories and the last having fourteen. The stories however were not all contemporary so in this edition we have a very mixed bag, from Sila Komchai’s likeable and rather Ballardian 1994 story ‘A Traffic-wise Couple’, about a middle-class couple who spend most of their lives stuck in their car in Bangkok’s traffic, to the rather incomprehensible ‘The Muzzle’ by Suchart Sawasdisri (“The Pope of the Thai short story”) in which a photographer documents in a rather abstract fashion the presence of army tanks on the streets during a military coup. Also from Komchai is ‘Blood Buds’, about a screenwriter wrestling with both his young son’s predilection for violent behaviour and the violent screenplay he is contracted to write. My favourite is the witty and appealingly odd ‘The Lookers-on’ by Korn Siriwatthano, concerning a group of people try to figure out the purpose of a mysterious, vaguely-defined object that has appeared in the street. There are two autobiographical stories from Seksan Prasertkul looking back to his days of insurrection against the communists. Manop Thanomsri’s ‘The Night of the Falling Stars’ is an unexpectedly upbeat story of an accidental meeting between a disillusioned tycoon and a naive street-dweller. However, easily the most appealing story is Reungsak Kamthorn’s ‘Ties That Bind’, about an elderly man and woman who try to rekindle their youthful passion after their spouses have died, despite family objections. It wraps up a lively and enlightening group of stories.
