Where things ain't what they seem
On Friday Benji and I took a trip to the majestic-looking National Library of Thailand in Bangkok, somewhere I hope to be spending some time in the coming years. But, quelle dommage, let's be frank right up front and say in both appearance and substance it's not a patch on somewhere like the British Library in London. There's a rather sad feel to the place as if everyone there knows it ought to be much, much better: shelves are poorly filled, many books are in poor condition, it does not have the feel of a library that's meant to be enjoyed. Naturally I took a look at the English language fiction shelves, which seem to be defined by whatever they can get hold of or the few books that get donated: there were perhaps around 200 works of English language fiction in all, in a wide range of bindings and age. As for the scattered amount of science fiction and fantasy, here's the total: just about every Harry Potter book in either paperback or hardcover, several tattered paperback copies of H.G. Wells's The Invisible Man, a couple of abridged paperbacks of The Time Machine, what actually looks like a rebound 1908 first edition (!) of Wells's The War in the Air, plus a torn paperback of Huxley's Brave New World. Then for curiosity value add to this two rather battered and bruised Robert Silverberg first editions, Hawksbill Station and To Live Again. And that's about it.
There is also something rather unexpected on those few fiction shelves: this copy of Harry Nicolaides's Verisimilitude. Only fifty copies of this self-published novel were ever printed, and only seven sold. Nicolaides was jailed for three years in Thailand last month for a paragraph in this book which was deemed to be rather derogatory towards a fictional Thai crown prince, something that, the courts decided, nevertheless contravened Thailand's draconian lèse majesté law. The offending text is here. It's rather bizarre in a 'left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing' way that the author was given a custodial sentence yet the 'offensive' material is still made freely available in the National Library (and I wonder if Nicolaides may have donated the book himself, after which the shit truly hit the fan). Thankfully yesterday Nicolaides was pardoned after his mother in Australia had had a stroke two weeks ago. You can't help but feel for the guy, and yes, having sampled a few pages, the book does look interesting.