farang go south

farang think "this is better than flying any day of the week"
Bangkok – Bang Saphan, 19 June 2007.

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2007 books

50) Peter Ackroyd, The Plato Papers, 1999
Ackroyd's famously good biographies, of which I have read precisely none, also provide a fertile ground for his imaginative novels that frequently use London as a setting. But in the London of 3700AD it's only the name of the city that has survived intact, with the orator Plato attempting to reconstruct present-day life and language from the sketchiest of available details, and ending up on trial as a result. The rather repetitive joke is how often Plato gets it wrong, but that's intended as a dig at the fallacy of trying to construct a convincing reality from nothing more than a philosophical conviction.The Plato Papers is too referential for it to be much more than a kind of errant joining-of-the-dots, with askance nods towards Darwin, Dickens, T.S. Eliot, Freud and Alfred Hitchcock; it's playful nonsense of course, more intentionally light-hearted than deep but amusingly done nonetheless.

word of the day
literature (n.): a word of unknown provenance, generally attributed to 'litter' or waste.

2007 books

51) Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street, 1991
Esperanza Cordero is a young Mexican girl growing up in a 1960s Chicago tenement, not exactly on the wrong side of the tracks but poor nonetheless, and desolate Mango Street is the place she needs to escape from. This series of forty-six first-person vignettes captures defining moments and experiences often with pinpoint sharpness, and it's also noticeable how the writing increases in sophistication as Esperanza becomes more mature, as her family and friends move on and her perception of her own young life becomes gradually more muted and melancholy under the gentle weight of added layers. A vibrantly written book with prose that often captures the time and place with a near perfect clarity.