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The circus of life, Arkartdamkeung Rapheephat, 1929

 

The disaffected son of a Thai aristocrat goes to study law in London in the early 1920s, only to fall in love with an English journalist and become a reporter. In England, France, the US, Japan and China, their work and his fear of poverty and cultural incompatibility conspire to keep them apart and their love unfulfilled. When his eyesight fails him, he returns to Siam broke and broken-hearted.

The circus of life is the first important Thai novel, providing unusual glimpses of the western world and Asia between the wars. Written by a young prince adroitly mixing fact and fiction, it created a storm when it was published in 1929. Thanks to its classic craftsmanship, fast pace, lively tone and themes of alienation, absurdity and injustice in life, this pioneering work of fiction remains astonishingly modern.

 

 

An elephant named Maliwan, Thanorm Maha-paoraya, 1943

 

The eternal love triangle: a drunkard, his son and an elephant. When Prince Suriya, “the number-one drunkard in Bangkok”, accidentally finds himself in a forestry concession, he befriends its prized white elephant, the mischievous Maliwan, who shares his taste for rice wine and loves him obsessively. Meanwhile, the prince is believed to have died at sea. Two years later, as he is seriously ill with malaria, his “widow” is about to remarry. Will he come round in time to stop the wedding? How is Maliwan involved in this? And the prince’s son?

This gem of a novel, written during the Second World War, is an amazingly realistic tale of sacrifice in the name of love, at once humorous and tragic.

 

 

Wanlaya’s love, Seinee Saowaphong, 1952

 

Paris after the Second World War: the Left Bank, Montmartre, and Picasso’s dove. Wanlaya is a Thai music student with challenging ideas and challenged friends – Tueanta, the model wife who divorces her careerist diplomat of a husband; René, the surrealistic painter who shuns life; Yong, the drifting sailor who goes back to his roots; Seinee and François, the journalists; Jeannette; and many others – all engaged in their own ways in a search for the true values of life, from the Jardin du Luxembourg to the Thai paddy field, via the lessons of French and Spanish history, via Marseille, the Asturias, Davos and Deauville. The meaning of art, the birth of music, the evil of elitist education, the value of work, women’s liberation: this swinging, iconoclastic novel of ideas, published in the early 1950s but only read twenty years later, has inspired Thai progressive circles ever since, and remains a hymn to life clamouring for change and ringing with the hopes and generosity of youth.

 

 

Ghosts, Seinee Saowaphong, 1953

 

Just as Wanlaya’s love was no love story, The ghosts is no ghost story, but a love story between Sai Seema, a son of the paddy field lucky enough to study his way into a law office, and Ratchanee, the youngest daughter of a conservative aristocrat lucky enough to study and work her way out of the stifling family cocoon. A parallel love story draws together Ratchanee’s best friend, Kingthian, and a dedicated civil servant. All four come to realize that their future lies with the people. Centred on the conflict between the old aristocratic elite and a new crop of educated intellectuals ready to fight against oppression in the name of progress and a better world, the novel also provides a vivid and still topical account of the plight of the farmers tricked out of their lands by local influential persons. Like Wanlaya’s love, this prophetic work found its public twenty years after its serialization in the early 1950s. To the post-1973 generation, it is the quintessential Thai novel.

 

 

The field of the great, Marlai Choophinit, 1954

 

This vivid chronicle of an upcountry district in the heart of Siam is told through the rise of Ruen, an aspiring timber trader who leads the small community of Khlong Suan Mark in its fight against nature and against man at the turn of the last century (1890-1909). Epidemics, fires, floods, famine and banditry forge a common will to survive and prosper despite all odds. Children are born and die. Families flee and return. Under the lure of money, simple men break their word, until they know better. Freedom and friendship are the guiding principles in Ruen’s fighting world. He marries Sutjai, beds her best friend Jampa, and worships Lamiat, the wife of his worst enemy. This epic social fresco and ode to human endeavour and wilfulness, written in lush, swift prose, will take you through a wide sweep of emotions.

 

 

The story of Jan Darra, Utsana Phleungtham, 1966

 

Sex, guilt and retribution. Apparently inspired by the goings-on at a neighbouring palace during the author’s childhood, The Story of Jan Darra is set in the expansive residence of a retired nobleman whose carnal excesses set the tune for the whole community. The story focuses on the sexual rivalry between His Lordship and his despised son, Jan Darra, who turns out not to be his son at all and who, in time, will reap revenge over his tormentor. Erotic pleasures described in hyperbolic, neoclassical fashion are merely a pretext to create in intricate detail a self-contained microcosm ruled by lust if not passion and by scheming self-interest. With its skilful construction, psychological insights, lush prose and steamy yet inoffensive sex scenes, not to mention its overly Buddhist moral stance, this is an exceptional novel with few equivalents in the world of literature.

 

 

The judgment, Chart Korbjitti, 1981

 

“This is the story of a young man who took as his wife a widow who was slightly deranged…” Fak is the humble janitor of a provincial temple school. A former novice due to an outstanding career as a monk, he defrocks to help his ageing, struggling father. While Fak is in the army, his father takes a wife. When the old man dies, Fak shares his hut with the widow. As he repels her advances and protects her from a hostile community, he falls prey to prejudice and misunderstandings from his neighbours, and there is nothing he can do to overturn the people’s judgment. He will find solace in alcohol, which “liberates” him by providing oblivion. The man he trusts most cheats him in total impunity … This epoch-making novel is a scathing satire and chilling indictment of modern society, which makes heroes of “fuckin’ cheats” and condemns upright citizens out of sheer hypocrisy. The tale is set in the rural central Thailand of the 1980s, but it concerns you, whoever and wherever you are – now, and even more so tomorrow.

 

 

The Khoak Phranang Quartet, Wimon Sainimnuan

 

I – Snakes, 1984

 

Monks, murder, money, miracles and mystifications. Snakes galore (pythons and cobras) and sleazy slitherings intertwining with scandal, suicide and rape in the central Thai village of Khoak Phranang – boxing, brawling and beheadings in the boondocks. Meet Yeesun, murderer, boxer, snake catcher and a good man. Meet the Khamnan, a power-hungry rapist and would-be politician. Meet Abbot Nian (Father Smoothy), who beheads Buddha statues, kills a monk and beds and bribes another for the greater glory of his temple. Meet phalli-crafter Old Monk Tei, minion Brother Janthorn, Krathin the grass widow, Chot Black Cobra, Phrai­dam the Destroyer, and scheming Aunt Klam. A tale told at break­neck speed with bite and sardonic humour. A daring novel written in 1984 denouncing the betrayal of Buddhism in the age of rampant consumerism.

 

II – The medium, 1988

 

What Snakes was to the Buddhist religion, The Medium is to black magic: another corrosive denunciation of fraudulent practices and people’s credulity. Does the spirit of the banyan tree exist or is it a product of the individual and collective imagination? The answer isn’t as clear-cut as you might think. Yet when poor villager Kharm reluctantly becomes its medium, he becomes a power to be reckoned with who will accumulate riches and lovers and get the better of his former nemesis, Village Headman Thongma. Yet to be published.

 

III – Lord of the land, 1995

 

The third part of the quartet pits Abbot Nian against Medium Kharm in a long struggle for supremacy. You can guess who the losers in the game are, but can you guess who the winner is? Yet to be published.

 

IV – Khoak Phranang, 1989

 

As a postscript of sort, this short, straight narrative of the fate of another Khoak Phranang family squeezed dry in a time of flooding provides a scathing allegory of the condition of the whole Thai peasantry, the ever pliable and suffering backbone of the country. Yet to be published.

 

 

Of time and tide, Atsiri Thammachoat, 1985

 

Time and tide wait for no woman. Noi, at 19, is three times widowed – a girl working overtime by gutting fish before Police Officer Sommai takes her away from the tide to a life of love and leisure that lasts only until he, too, is killed. The narrator’s mother is a wealthy fishing boat owner who has lost everything. Both women are losers in the tremendous changes that reshape Thai shores within a couple of decades, from the halcyon days of drift-net fishing to those of the trawlers and today’s era of mass tourism. Little people, simple lives, modest dreams, traditional beliefs, petty fights, tragic accidents, and the dictates of the authorities: how fishermen alienate themselves from nature and lose their moorings is told in a patchwork, poetic narrative of rare beauty. A 1980s masterpiece to defy time and tide.

 

Time in a bottle, Praphatsorn Seiwikun, 1985

 

How do teenagers feel when their parents separate and find themselves new partners? How do you feel when the young woman you love has only friendship to give, and you only have friendship to give to the girl who loves you? When you are dragged into studies you hate, and your friends die or go mad as their generous dreams drift into the nightmare of history? Time in a bottle, a national bestseller emblematic of the 1970s student generation, explores the generation gap between parents and children in a Bangkok middle-class family, the pains of growing up and tug-of-war between friendship and love in teenage hearts. Fatso, the endearingly shy, gruff and melancholy narrator, is a troubled adolescent who misses his happy childhood: a swift and deft patchwork of flashbacks, impressionistic and particularly vivid and true to life, sketches a world of feelings and frustrations familiar to adolescents the world over.

 

 

Cobra, Wa-nit Jarungkit-anan, 1987

 

When wealthy, foreign-educated businessman Chanachon falls in love with tourist guide Meikkhala, it is not the wily if flighty urbanite that fascinates him but rather the quintessential female owner of a traditional Thai house in the countryside, to which he keeps coming back against all reason in a fumbling quest for his own past. Neither the resident cobra in her house nor the resident wife in his nor Meikkhala’s uncouth former suitor take well to the affair, though. As tension builds up and the cobra slithers and strikes, this uncommon love story which derides the traditional elements of romance offers unforgettable contrasting portraits of two typically upper-class Thai women in love whose upbringing and social status pit them against each other. Yet to be published.

 

 

Mad dogs & Co, Chart Korbjitti, 1988

 

Patpong, Pattaya, Phuket and other paradises for a gang of mad dogs and sundry sonzabitches. Babble, booze and grass and snow and magic mushrooms and… Through the interwoven stories of Otto and Thai, a social satire that focuses on society’s dropouts to better analyse the conflict of generations, the power and plague of friendship and the joys and sorrows of alternative thinking and living – all this through the medium of a drunken conversation in times of downpour. A tour de force.

 

 

The path of the tiger, Sila Komchai, 1989

 

A hunter loses his way in the jungle as he pursues a barking deer he has wounded. When he realizes he is being stalked by a tiger, he clambers up a tree and, after a night of terror and self-pity, finally musters enough courage to confront the king of the jungle. The outcome of the encounter is unexpected.

Based on this simple plot, Sila Komchai has written an extremely rich and complex novel about self-discovery, coloured with superb descriptions of the Thai jungle.

The hero, an archetypal 1970s left-wing militant, discovers that most of his fears and woes are self-created, and learns the paramount importance of self-control and peace of mind. In its intensity and focus, The path of the tiger could have been titled “The young man and the jungle”, as it has strong parallels with The Old Man and the Sea.

 

 

Time, Chart Korbjitti, 1993

 

A day in the life of half-a-dozen women in a hospice: an improbable subject for a definite masterpiece. Part play, part film treatment, part traditional novel, this is a comedy to make you cry and think beyond the laughs, a quietly corrosive study of a society of fast-changing values and modes of life and death, with underlying questions about the meaning of life, work, artistic creation and human relations. This nouveau roman earned the author of The judgment his second SEA Write Award, in 1994.

 

 

the twenty best novels of thailand, an anthology, Marcel Barang, 1994

 

Everything you should know about Thai literature, starting from the days before the novel. Biography of each author with scenario, excerpts and discussion of each of the twenty works selected covering the period 1929 to 1994.

 

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