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Summary
Summary
"Recreates the experience of living in Thailand's aqueous climate so viscerally that you can feel the water rising around your ankles." --Ron Charles, Washington Post
"Important, ambitious, and accomplished." --Mohsin Hamid, New York Times bestselling author of Exit West
A missionary doctor pines for his native New England even as he succumbs to the vibrant chaos of nineteenth-century Siam. A post-World War II society woman marries, mothers, and holds court, little suspecting her solitary fate. A jazz pianist in the age of rock, haunted by his own ghosts, is summoned to appease the house's resident spirits. In the present, a young woman tries to outpace the long shadow of her political past. And in a New Krungthep yet to come, savvy teenagers row tourists past landmarks of the drowned old city they themselves do not remember. Time collapses as these lives collide and converge, linked by the forces voraciously making and remaking the amphibious, ever-morphing capital itself. Bangkok Wakes to Rain is an elegy for what time erases and a love song to all that persists, yearning, into the unknowable future.
Author Notes
Pitchaya Sudbanthad is the author of the novel Bangkok Wakes to Rain , published by Riverhead Books (US) and Sceptre (UK). He has received fellowships in fiction writing from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the MacDowell Colony, and currently splits time between Bangkok and Brooklyn.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Sudbanthad's meditative debut drifts back and forth through time, evoking Bangkok past, present, and future. Loosely woven narratives follow Nee, a girl whose lover is killed during anti-government protests in 1973, as she navigates life in a melancholy city bleeding out its ancient culture. In one story, Nee is estranged from her sister Nok after she discovers Nok's restaurant in Japan buys its Thai ingredients from a corrupt ex-colonel. In another, Nee goes to work managing a high-rise condo, the lobby of which is a colonial-style Thai house-the heart of this novel-once owned by one of the building's wealthy elderly residents. When the old woman's son comes home from abroad, he and Nee begin a disastrous affair. Interspersed among Nee's stories (which are not presented chronologically) are beautifully wrought tales of a doctor-missionary in old Siam, whose Western faith morphs into enlightenment with the help of witch doctors, cholera, and despair. Occasionally birds will narrate a story-or an aging American jazz musician, another foreigner seduced by Krungthep, the name the Thai people use to describe their city. Though this novel's ambitious architecture-disparate stories in shifting eras-can sometimes work against its considerable strengths, all of Sudbanthad's characters live and breathe with authenticity, and his prose is deeply moving, making for an evocative debut. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Like a building presenting many lit windows, Sudbanthad's novel contains a multitude of stories within its confines, offering readers a glimpse into lives across centuries and continents, all connected to Thailand. In the 1800s, a missionary doctor longs for another posting as he sees how challenging it is to upend the teachings of a deeply rooted culture and history. In more modern times, a Los Angeles transplant returns to his home when he learns his father may die, while separately a closeted gay musician is invited to perform a concert that only spirits will attend. All these stories, and more, are connected by the building that survives the centuries, either as a mission, a mansion, or condominiums. Providing only a few details to indicate time and place in this assured debut, Sudbanthad provides a broad overview of Bangkok's history while diving deep into individual stories of romance, revolution, and suffering. The result is similar to an Impressionist painting, a picture made up of many vivid stories that combine to create a resonant whole.--Bridget Thoreson Copyright 2019 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
IN 2010, my husband and I left our young children sleeping at home in Bangkok and went out to cover what we feared would be a massacre. In front of us, in the hazy heat of May, a military sniper shot a street protester. Armored personnel carriers rumbled toward us from different directions, trapping protesters in a pincér motion. A block away from the killing, street vendors were selling coconut ice cream. At least 90 people died in the security forces' assault on protesters that spring, including two medics, an Italian photographer and a soldier struck by friendly fire. When we got home, our boys were still napping. To this day, no one has been held accountable for the deaths nine years ago. For all its memorable brashness - the chili-laced cuisine, the vicious heat, the excess of tropical botany - Thailand excels in forgetting, a deliberate amnesia that makes history turn, if not in circles at least in cul-de-sacs. Two novels from Thai-born authors, "Bangkok Wakes to Rain," by Pitchaya Sudbanthad, and "The Blind Earthworm in the Labyrinth," by Veeraporn Nitiprapha, examine these hidden, overlooked spaces, where ghosts and spirits and discarded dreams orbit, even as people try to outpace the past. "So much," Pitchaya writes, "had been lost or erased from the books." There are a lot of characters in "Bangkok Wakes to Rain," multiple generations all connected, it turns out, to a single house built by the great-great-grandfather of Sammy, a photographer with a penchant for leaving when things get uncomfortable. In rough chronological order, the Bangkok home is linked to an American missionary doctor, a divorced socialite, a construction worker hopped up on brightly colored pills, a student who survived an earlier political massacre, a troubled plastic surgeon and the young owner of one of the faces he carves. There are many others. Some are animals. At first, each chapter feels more like a deft character sketch than something with the forward momentum of a novel. Eventually, though, the stories begin to intersect and build on one another, like banana leaves woven to make a floating offering for the water spirits. Despite the profusion of characters, Pitchaya's debut novel is more an evocation of a place than of a people. In Thai, Bangkok is called Krungthep, and not just that but Krungthep Mahanakhon Amon Rattanakosin Mahinthara Ayuthaya and over a dozen words more. It means the city of angels, the great city, the residence of the Emerald Buddha, the impregnable city and so on. Sammy's father, a former Thai diplomat living in London with Sammy's British stepmother, laments the latest paroxysm of political violence in Bangkok, the deaths of more pro-democracy students on the streets as the military imposes its will. He asks Sammy, also in self-imposed exile, whether he still knows Krungthep's full name, as he did when he was a boy. Sammy does not. Few Thais remember how to say the entire name; getting partway through is like knowing a few numbers past the decimal point of Pi. Bangkok is changing too fast, shedding layers of its history like the skins of a snake. Yet the city retains its allure, and the quest to return is like some animal, "its tail straightened like a rudder. Sammy knows it won't stop until it's home." "The Blind Earthworm in the Labyrinth," which won the South East Asian Writers Award for the original Thai edition, is also lush with characters - and foliage and fauna. In Veeraporn's telling, the Thai capital doesn't unfold, as in Pitchaya's plaited tale, but explode. Like a Thai soap opera that captivates viewers in air-conditioned condos and wooden shacks alike, the novel follows three characters, two sisters named Chareeya and Chalika and an orphaned boy named Pran, and the concentric circles of melodrama and tragedy that trap them. There are affairs, deaths and doomed romances aplenty but, as in a telenovela, the effect is less poignant and more propulsive. In Veeraporn's Bangkok and the small riverside town near the Thai capital where the three main characters grow up, the colors appear heightened, the sounds - Schumann, the Cure, the Thai country music that was fortified by what Vietnam War vets left behind - amplified. Ghosts mingle with lovers. A woman is the mother of five children who shared three fathers, "a mathematical riddle and parentage conundrum." Adjectives abound. Gardens overflow with champaca, pikui, ylang ylang, Mon rose, monkey flowers and butterfly pea, an unfamiliar and thrilling taxonomy. Chareeya and Pran flirt, a ritual that can seem "like two Siamese fighting fish grappling each other in a bottle of glue." Characters feast on Israeli tabbouleh, Hungarian goulash and rosetinted spheres of condensed goat milk from India - a nod to the Thai ability to synthesize new ingredients, music or art and give them a distinct national flavor. The effect of Veeraporn's narrative is akin to a malarial hallucination, but that's what Bangkok feels like: a soap opera in which someone wakes up and realizes that the preceding episodes were all just a fever dream. Or is the waking the actual dream? The exact fates of characters matter less than the unexpected rotations of life. Veeraporn describes a mollusk that discovers its shell has gone missing while it slept. "It spent the rest of its life creeping along, naked, in the cold loneliness of a beach shining with a million white shells," she writes, "without ever being able to find a shell that fit quite like the battered old shell it had lost - not a single one." "The Blind Earthworm in the Labyrinth" was written in Thai and painstakingly translated by Kong Rithdee, a movie critic and documentary filmmaker. There are few concessions made to non-Thai audiences, apart from an occasional footnote to explain a touchstone of Thai culture and a list of botanical names at the end of the book. Veeraporn's Bangkok is an immersive experience, exotic but not exoticized. Pitchaya, who grew up in Thailand but also in Saudi Arabia and the Southern United States, informs in a more conventional fashion. "Bangkok Wakes to Rain" is written in English and, particularly in the first half of the novel, explanatory clauses about Thai history or culture can feel a bit like a travel guide, albeit an adroitly written one. The novel falters when it reaches into the future, a dystopian vision of a capital drowned by hubris and climate change. Bangkok's reality is both real and surreal enough without entering the realm of science fiction. But Pitchaya soon takes the story back to the past, and characters that were just one part of the city's mosaic - a once-famous jazz pianist, an American missionary coming to terms with Bangkok, the now-middle-aged survivor of the long-ago military crackdown - come alive. "The forgotten return again and again, as new names and faces, and again this city makes new ghosts," Pitchaya writes. For Veeraporn, that ritual of recollection and loss - "to erase from our heads who we are, what we've had to feel happy or sad about, or that we ever had anything to remember" - takes place in an urban jungle in which the real jungle intrudes, with bugs and snakes and giant monitor lizards. Bangkok is an overgrown Garden of Eden in which digging turns up nothing but "blind earthworms, one after another, lost in a labyrinth of their own making." Ghosts and spirits and discarded dreams orbit, even as people try to outpace the past. HANNAH BEECH is the Southeast Asia bureau chief of The Times, based in Bangkok.
Guardian Review
This exuberant debut is a swirling, multi-generational tale that shifts from the historical to the futuristic "The not remembering doesn't really work, does it?" says Nee, one of the many characters in Pitchaya Sudbanthad's exuberant, meticulously plotted debut. She is speaking to a grieving man named Sammy, back in Bangkok after years abroad and now forced to confront his tangled relationship with his parents and his home city. Nee herself lives with a painful, complicated story that decades have failed to heal. The condominium block in which she and Sammy find themselves caught in this moment of unexpected tenderness stands on a plot of land that was once the compound of Sammy's family home. As the tides of Bangkok's history flow around them, the two are united by a sense of loss and confusion: how can they reconcile their pasts, even as they struggle to comprehend their city's headlong rush into the future? The indelibility of memory - both individual and collective - forms the central pillar of this sprawling, multi-generational novel, where characters appear and disappear, only to reappear a hundred pages and several decades later. Their lives may span different eras and locations, even imagined worlds, but they are constantly pulled back to a central reality that revolves around Bangkok. In a swirling, always surprising storytelling structure that at times recalls David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas , Sudbanthad skilfully orchestrates the huge cast of characters. A 19th-century missionary struggles to adjust to the harshness of life in the tropics and, later, the futility of his calling. A jazz pianist in the 1970s is hired to perform for the ghosts that haunt the house of a wealthy ageing woman; her son, Sammy, visits his dying father in London after a restless existence trying in vain to settle down in a number of countries with a number of different women. One of those women, Nee, struggles to come to terms with the murder of her friends by the military in the mid-70s. Haunted by a sense of loss and guilt following her hair's breadth escape, she reinvents herself as a swimming coach and manager of the block of flats on the site of Sammy's family home. New buildings, old pain: despite the city's transformation, it is unable to forget the traumas that lurk under its shiny surface. Which of these narrative strands exerts the greatest pull? The agile rendering of the numerous voices and points of view makes it difficult to favour one character over the others, although some stake a claim to being the principal players. Nee's survival of the student demonstrations of the 70s provides a grimly realist core to a novel whose shifting boundaries stretch from the historical to the futuristic, with Bangkok ultimately reimagined as a permanently flooded city. Despite the novel's obvious ecological and political concerns, we stay anchored in the characters' daily struggles, even as the world changes around them - a sensation that speaks not just to our feeling of powerlessness in the face of history, but to the belief in the inevitability of destiny and karma. One constant in the furious ebb and flow is the sense of estrangement - from one's home country, in exile that is either voluntary (Sammy, or Nee's sister Nok, who lives in Japan) or forced (the army colonel said to be responsible for the student killings); from one's family; from one's national and social history; and even from oneself. Collectively, the characters explore ideas of belonging that feel pertinent to the times we live in now: what does it mean to be alienated, even if one has never left one's home city? Is being an outsider ever a question of choice? For all its plotting pyrotechnics, the novel is at its best when it settles on delicate moments of human intimacy. When Sammy and Nee meet in his recently deceased mother's apartment, he cracks a joke in an attempt to lighten the atmosphere and mask his grief, but she does not respond. "She didn't understand that he had not bothered with the business of sombreness and tears because he wanted to prove to his dead mother that he was no longer a child." Part of him, conditioned by years of living in the US, expects "some variation of a consoling embrace", but instead he receives the briefest of pats on the shoulder - a gesture that speaks not merely of the cultural divide with which Sammy now lives, but of the impossibility of either of them finding the solace they crave.
Kirkus Review
In his debut novel, a writer born in Thailand and now living in New York creates a portrait of Bangkok that sweeps across a century and a teeming cast of characters yet shines with exquisite detail.In its early chapters, the book reads like a collection of short stories linked only by their relationship to Bangkok: A nameless woman walks through its bustling streets in the present; an American doctor more than 100 years ago struggles to decipher its overwhelmingly foreign culture; a Thai photographer living in Los Angeles in the 1970s visits his ailing father in London; a woman running a Thai restaurant in Japan finds herself threatened by Thailand's politics. But as those seemingly unconnected stories accumulate, so do the threads that join them. Many are stories of loss and of survival. In one, a young Thai man named Siripohng, who has come to the city to attend university, meets a woman named Nee during the massive student demonstrations in 1973. Sudbanthad draws a subtle but achingly lovely account of their courtship, born of the hopeful spirit of the proteststhen pivots to a shocking conclusion. In another, an American jazz musician called Crazy Legs Clyde is summoned to a woman's estate to play piano because a medium, she tells him, "counts twenty or so spirits in the pillar. They visit me in my dreams, and I'm tired of it. A woman my age needs her sound sleep." But the assignment to exorcise them raises a ghost from Clyde's past that won't be stilled. Ghosts haunt this novel, even the ghosts of buildings, like the ancient tile-roofed house preserved within the lobby of a gleaming new skyscraper where some of the book's characters will live (and at least one will die). As one character muses near the end of the novel, "The forgotten return again and again, as new names and faces, and again this city makes new ghosts." Yet in Sudbanthad's skillful hands and lyrical prose, every one of them seems vividly alive.This breathtakingly lovely novel is an accomplished debut, beautifully crafted and rich with history rendered in the most human terms. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Always, she arrives near evening. The last few children in blue-and-white uniforms have finished their after-school work and are plodding along in small gangs or, like her, alone. They don't take notice of her; they have screens in their hands, shoves and teasing to repay, snacks bagged in newsprint to grease up their fingers. In their trail, sparrows tussle over fallen fried crumbs and biscuit sticks trampled to powder by little shoes. A pearl-eyed lottery seller, sensing passersby from footsteps and the clap of flip-flops, calls out over an opened case of clothes-pinned tickets to whoever craves luck. Her nose picks up the ashen smell always in the air. Somewhere, a garbage heap incinerates underneath a highway overpass; in temples, incense sticks release sweet smoke to the holy and the dead; flames curl blue in the open-air gas grills of shophouse food stalls. She is a child or a few thousand years old. Would it ever matter? The city will stay this way for her. When she was a uniformed primary schooler herself, walking home along these very streets, she liked to make believe she was a bewildered traveler in a foreign city, drawn forward by alluring strangeness. She couldn't have known then that there would be years ahead when she didn't have to pretend, and years still further ahead when pretending was all she could do. Fresh, fresh, hot, hot, good for kids, delicious for grown-ups, twenty bahts, twenty bahts. She counts on hearing the soy milk lady's singsongy cry ahead of the others. The thicker the crowd on the sidewalk, the louder the hawkers call out. Stampedes of dusty shoes and shopping bags and stray dogs crisscross near the ground; canopies of sun-shielding umbrellas and twisty headphone cords drift above. The fruit sellers have laid parrot-green pyramids of pomelo on their tables. They holler, "Come, pretty young sister! Come sample this!" and she tells them maybe tomorrow, knowing they'll be at the same spot to greet her the next morning as she hurries to catch the 6:45 at the Skytrain station. Auntie Tofu, Uncle Big Mouth, the Egret: she doesn't know their real names, only the monikers her mother mentioned when boasting of discounts negotiated at the produce scale. The vendors pick up halved mangosteens to show off the white flesh balled inside like an unbloomed flower. It's about the time of the year when these particular fruits become more plentiful, though that wasn't always the case, especially during the calamitous years-lifetimes ago it seems-when orchards drowned and few trucks dared brave watery roads to deliver what little of the crop had been saved. Those days are hardly worth remembering, are they? Everything is now back in its place. The asphalt before her darkens in the shadow of the building she thinks of as home. The usual guard salutes her from the gatehouse, a walkie-talkie raised to his forehead. When building management first upgraded the security setup to attract higher-paying tenants for the rental floors, she thought the cameras were turning to follow her. She'd find out that the motion was simply an automatic preset and the feeds went to backroom monitors attended by no one. She was young then and didn't realize that there was already scant escape from being watched, camera or no camera. Eyes are everywhere, pointing down from balconies and windows, through the iron fencing and palm thickets that separate the building's grounds from the unruly street. She can feel eyes on her skin, even now. It won't surprise her to turn around from this walk up the driveway and find the guard peeling her with his stare. Where the building's communal shrine stands, a sun-reddened European family, probably one of the short-term renters, is clicking selfies in front of the week's offerings-oranges and bottled cola-for higher entities and land spirits. The pudgy-faced father turns in her direction, eyes widened, before resuming his pose for another shot. In the lobby, chilled, purified air welcomes her. How many times has she walked over these granite tiles? Always in a rush, out and in. No letting up the pace. There isn't need for any hurry now. She can take the remainder of her life, if she wants. As she passes, the receptionist behind the front desk barely glances at her, occupied by the telenovela playing on a small tablet that slides out from under her folders when the manager isn't around. There's no customer at the coffee nook, where the receptionist also triples as barista and cashier should someone obey the beckoning paw of the Japanese porcelain cat on the counter. The coffee venture was part of a flurry of renovations management had embarked upon after she left for abroad. One year, she'd returned to find the lobby's gray walls covered up by prefabricated panels of exposed brick and the waiting area's threadbare sofa replaced by sleeker Scandinavian-by-way-of-Thai-factories chaises and sectionals. Another visit, a spa meant for expats and tourists had opened on one end of the ground floor, and the music from the lobby's overhead speakers had switched from Thai pop hits to rain forest sounds laid over tinkling chimes. Even the elevator bank had gotten a makeover, with footlights installed along the walls and the nicked beige doors refashioned with a few coats of auspicious firecracker red for the Chinese renters. She stops in front of the call button, her hands clenched. Maybe this will be the time she gives in to the temptation to push it and wait for the arrival bell, a sound she has heard thousands of times. It's nearly seven o'clock. Both her parents should be home from work. Her father's probably watering the plants on the balcony and doing his evening calisthenics routine-arms swinging and legs lifting-in the Premier League T-shirt and shorts he has changed into, and her mother's probably in her favorite chair by the window, arms spreading and folding the day-old newspaper that she always forgets to take for her train commute. Soup is simmering on the stove in the alcove kitchen. It's either the lotus stem curry that her father brings home twice a week from his favorite shop by his office, or the clear tofu soup he likes to make with vegetables left over from other dishes. The TV is on, as it usually is. To break the silence, as her mother says. The evening news anchors-always the genial pairing of a delicately featured woman and a bespectacled man-are at their desk, pitying the fallen and wounded in the day's roundup. At some point, her mother gets up to knock at the windows to tell her father to come inside. Her father pretends to ignore the knock, and her mother knocks again, with louder authority. The ding of the bell stiffens her back. The elevator has arrived on its own. Its red doors slide open with no one inside, and her own eyes return her gaze from the mirrored wall inside. She dares herself to step through. She should have known this already: she won't. She'll turn around and walk out the door at the rear of the building and onto the covered walkway leading to the pool. It will already be growing darker out there, no one to look up at the scatter of lit windows. She'll just slip out and leave, as she has always done. Before she can decide, something interrupts her. She can't say what it is-not a thing she can see, but different from a mere thought, and more than a feeling. It approaches her, cresting forcefully like a wave that has rippled across oceans. It wakes her, as if she were being shaken out of a dream. This is no dream. It's gathering outside of her. It speaks and says without speaking. A dreadful thing's about to happen. She squints out the lobby's windows. A dry-cleaning delivery van cruises down the drive, the hanger bags having been dropped off. That's all it probably was: a noisy engine startling an anxious woman. She wonders if any of the others also felt it. In the lobby, the receptionist sits undisturbed, her attention still with the telenovela. A tenant stands at the wall of mailboxes, flipping through envelopes. From the speakers, recorded jungle birds squawk out over a synthesized human choir. Her steps clap forward across the marble floor. She pushes the glass doors into the remaining warmth of the slow-boiled day. It is only so. Many times exiting through these doors, she mumbles the words: It is only so. It's a phrase she's said since she was barely more than a child, to steel herself for the unknowable day. A swim teacher first said it to her during a lesson, after a sparrow that had broken its neck against a sky-filled window fell dead into the pool, and she clung to the words as if they were a lifeline thrown to her. It is only so. She repeats the phrase three times, out of habit and a need to calm herself, not knowing why she's pacing the circular driveway, looking for what she can't even say. She suspects the guard is watching her again but doesn't turn around to check. Following the seeming tilt of the land, she lets her feet pull her like hounds toward the garden by the garage entrance, where drivers wait their turn to whirl down the window and tap their entry card. She has long avoided this area for the good chance of running into one of her parents behind the wheel of a car. The garden is nothing more than a square of yellowing grass and concrete planters. The air here feels thinned out. Her own footsteps, echoing back one, two, one, two, feel faded against an intensifying gradient of sensation. She's suddenly reminded of the few minutes before a concert begins, when musicians run through their warm-ups onstage. She loves hearing those first discordant notes climbing and collapsing in their collective routine as much as the program to come. What are these instruments that now play for her? She hears the flapping of a buzzard's wings, monsoon rain tapping on window glass. Song of harvest sounding across rice fields. Monks' prayers enveloping a hall of mourners. A hand bounding sharply past middle C. Some uproar above compels her to look up. She sees only the infinity of the bluing cloudless dusk and the darkened rise of the building, but her instincts command her to cross her arms overhead, turn away, and brace. Excerpted from Bangkok Wakes to Rain: A Novel by Pitchaya Sudbanthad All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
