2009 books
48) Prabhassorn Sevikul, Letter from a Blind Old Man and Other Stories, 2009
Sevikul is something of a big name in current Thai literature, having written around sixty novels with some adapted for film and TV, as well as serving as head of the Writers' Association of Thailand. Only now is his work being translated into Spanish and English and while that may indeed be a good thing, there are several stumbling blocks apparent in the process of making his work available elsewhere, namely poor translations served by weak copy-editing (and the publishing house, Nilubol, looks like it's Sevikul's own). Sevikul is known as someone who has a mastery of nuance in Thai however the translations of these stories convey none of that famous subtlety, being rendered mostly into rather flat sentences, and sometimes this gives the impression that the translator's first language is not English. But, to the stories themselves: gentle and sensitive are the watchwords here. In readership terms they mostly fall somewhere between adult and young adult, as if Sevikul is trying to impart lessons, or at least reminders, of the importance of family and friendships. Occasionally he does let his imagination run free such as in 'Two Skulls', an almost metaphysical contemplation of how people seem to replace their heads in the transition from child to adult, and the best story is probably 'Departed Son', a story of parental angst following the Bangkok student massacre of 1976. I will probably give his novel Time in a Bottle a try (given that it's on the list of 100 best books about Thailand and was also turned into an award-winning film), but on the strength of this collection I won't be raising my expectations too high.