2011 books

20) Collin Piprell, Bangkok Knights, 1989
Despite having lived here for two years now, this is only my third venture into Thailand's boisterous and often shady breed of expat fiction - my previous excursions all ended as disappointments. Canadian author and journalist Collin Piprell started out writing guide books for Thailand's diving community then worked his way into getting his short fiction published in the Bangkok Post. These are bar stories, yet their quality may be a cut above the rest in this often seedy sub-genre of world literature because Bangkok Knights has now received three different editions from three different publishers. If so, this collection probably sets a good 'bar story' standard: all of them are gently humorous or bittersweet in tone, neither outlandishly sexist nor patronising, and they share a cast of fairly well characterised (if rather clichéd) expat Western males combined with an assortment of colourful (if also rather clichéd) Thai females. What I expected to find, and certainly did, is that uneasy distrust that often sees them eyeing each other warily over the cultural barricades while still needing each other for various pre-determined selfish reasons, in fact it's often the cultural frisson that informs each story's plot.

The first-person narrator of all the stories remains largely invisible throughout except for a couple of episodes, one which describes a journalistic trip up the Maekok river that goes disastrously wrong (in fact the only non-bar story in the collection and probably the best), and the final outing which is an interesting mixture of relationship and identity crises running in parallel, something that probably comes upon any emotionally unattached, long-time expat resident of Thailand. Piprell has also written three novels, one of which is categorically science fiction. I expect I'll be reading them all.

2011 books

21) Mahmoud Saeed, Saddam City, 2004
One morning in 1979 Mustafa Ali Noman, a Basra schoolteacher, is arrested, imprisoned and tortured by Saddam's secret police, yet no reason is given other than the shrugged-off possibility of mistaken identity, and even that's not enough to stop the juggernaut of institutionalised cruelty that defined Saddam Hussein's era of paranoid and terrifying power from bearing down on him, similarly inflicted upon maybe hundreds of thousands of others who refused (or neglected) to join the Ba'ath Party. What Mahmoud Saeed does in this brief novel is to tell the story relatively straight without expending unnecessary effort to draw the reader further into the experience, instead offering a simple window on events. In this way the reader doesn't then feel manipulated in any way into revulsion for the baseless cruelties the narrator is describing – they're self-evident, while Mustafa alternately descends into further despair or rises to occasional hopes and with such an emotional rollercoaster ride being his alone, the Western reader may feel a little detached from it, somehow separated from the horrors and injustice by the matter-of-fact tone of the narrator. This is not so much an experiential novel as, moreover, a descriptive one, with emphatic shades of both Kafka and Solzhenitsyn informing the true-to-life events, which could well be based on Saeed's own experiences as an occasional prisoner of Saddam himself. As a document of the abuse of power on a frighteningly extensive and systematic scale that was possibly only surpassed by Stalin or the Khmer Rouge, this realistic fiction is a useful and necessary one.

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A Happy Fannish Birthday to frostfox.