![]() ![]() ![]() It’s a forever moving piece of not just place writing but period/cultural writings, which in that sense began to remind me a little of James Michener’s The Drifters (a novel I read and enjoyed as a teenager) but much more significant, bound by wild prose and history–including the present and climate change–not holding together the characters and their experiences together by mere threads but, seemingly, much more fluidly. The novel is a beautifully written elegy to Bangkok’s collective memory. I read the book in April, while adjusting to our new life in Nova Scotia, and would read at night in the absolute silence of the new place. This July, we are fortunate to travel to Bangkok, Thailand, to explore Pitchaya Sudbanthad’s Bangkok Wakes to Rain, published by Riverhead Books (US, 2020) and Sceptre (UK, 2019) in 2019 it was selected as a notable book of the year by The New York Times and The Washington Post as well as a finalist for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize. Adam Kirsch, The Global Novel: Writing the World in the 21st Century ![]() The local gains dignity, and significance, insofar as it can be seen as a part of a worldwide phenomenon. Life lived here is experienced in its profound and often unsettling connections with life lived elsewhere, and everywhere. In this way, it is faithful to the way the global is actually lived–not through the abolition of place, but as a theme by which place is mediated. ![]() The global novel exists, not as a genre separated from and opposed to other kinds of fiction, but as a perspective that governs the interpretation of experience. ![]()
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