Sightseeing
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4.0 • 3 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The national bestseller by the award-winning Thai American author. “A brilliant collection . . . brimming with sharp-clawed survival lessons” (Los Angeles Times).
Set in contemporary Thailand, these are generous, radiant tales of family bonds, youthful romance, generational conflicts, and cultural shiftings beneath the glossy surface of a warm, Edenic setting. Written with exceptional acuity, grace, and sophistication, the stories present a nation far removed from its exoticized stereotypes. In the prize-winning opening story “Farangs,” the son of a beachside motel owner commits the cardinal sin of falling for a pretty American tourist. In the novella, “Cockfighter,” a young girl witnesses her proud father’s valiant but foolhardy battle against a local delinquent whose family has a vicious stranglehold on the villagers.
Through his vivid assemblage of parents and children, natives and transients, ardent lovers and sworn enemies, Lapcharoensap dares us to look with new eyes at the circumstances that shape our views and the prejudices that form our blind spots. Gorgeous and lush, painful and candid, Sightseeing is an extraordinary reading experience, one that powerfully reveals that when it comes to how we respond to pain, anger, hurt, and love, no place is too far from home.
“Lapcharoensap is a commanding, animated tour guide, and a lot more than that—he can write with the bait and the hook of genuine talent . . . [He] has a gift for the detail that catches not only his Thai milieu but teenage life everywhere.” —Darin Strauss, The New York Times Book Review
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The Thailand of Westerners' dreams shares space with a Thailand plagued by social and economic inequality in this auspicious debut collection of seven plaintive and luminous stories. In the title tale an exquisite meditation on human dependency a son and his ailing mother must accept the dismal reality of her encroaching blindness and what it means for his plans to attend college away from home. In "Don't Let Me Die in This Place," the most exuberant of the stories, an ornery and uproarious widowed grandfather, recently crippled by a stroke, moves from Maryland to Bangkok to live with his son, Thai daughter-in-law and their two "mongrel children." "Farangs" and "At the Caf Lovely" convincingly examine adolescent friendship and love, as does "Priscilla the Cambodian" though when a refugee camp is torched by native Thai xenophobes, it veers toward the politically dark and ominous. Politics and fear also play a role in "Draft Day," a painfully grim story about two young male friends, one of whom avoids military conscription because of his privileged background, and "Cockfighter," the final and longest of the pieces, in which a berserk local thug rules a town through violence and corruption. Young or old, male or female, all of Lapcharoensap's spirited narrators are engaging and credible. Anger, humor and longing are neatly balanced in these richly nuanced, sharply revelatory tales.
