Review
She Kept the Bar Between Them: Stories from Thailand
2009
Bangkok Books
Review by Peter Young in The Thai Literary Supplement #16 (December 2019).
I don’t know Steve Rosse personally although I confess to having nagged him on Facebook to put together a collection of some of the fine essays he posts to the Thailand Expat Writers List. That book is at last a reality, but before its existence he just batted me away in good-humoured fashion repeatedly telling me instead to check out this, his most recent collection of fiction. Which I’ve now done, and feel all the better for it.
Many of the stories here, as you might expect, are superficially autobiographical in tone (but probably aren’t in fact) because Rosse clearly injects some imagination as well to raise things above the purely mundane. There are variations on the typical Thai ‘bar story’ which seem to skirt around the central issue (ie. where you think the story will go) and find other points of interest to head for instead, such as in ‘Pilgrimage’, in which a farang enjoys his very last beer. There is a good science fiction adventure in ‘The Crooked Houses’ which is set in a far-future Patong Bay, exploring inhabited submerged condos. There is domestic strife aplenty plus several bad linguistic jokes, more than a few sexual peccadilloes and a handful of east/west cultural misunderstandings, hopes and shattered dreams: plenty enough to fill eighteen stories. But the best story of all for my money is the final one, ‘The Night Stalker’, about a seen-it-all hack doing his rounds of the Bangkok bars, always on the look-out for something he hasn’t seen before, and yes, he finds it. It’s an excellent, upbeat story with which Rosse rounds off this collection.
But fiction aside, I’m pleased there are now more of Rosse’s experiences to read about in his new collection, Leaving Thailand: A Memoir …now top of the TBR pile.