![]() ![]() Pitchaya artfully intertwines the fate of Bangkok-and what he later imagines as New Bangkok after a terrible flooding-with the main characters’ longing for things past. ![]() Much of early Bangkok was designed in remembrance of that former international trading port and royal house farther up the Chao Phraya River. Bangkok itself is an apt exemplar, as the town was born as a refuge after the Burmese sacked Ayutthaya in the 18th century. Those rituals they perform, some of them spiritual and some of them diurnal, are a way to connect themselves to a remembered past. Some of Pitchaya’s uprooted individuals are displaced from a physical locality-others from traditions and histories that defined earlier versions of themselves and their communities. His debut novel Bangkok Wakes to Rain is as much an ode to the metropolis’s extremes as it is to the wide-ranging and singular characters that animate its streets and sois.Īll of the characters of this novel connect with Bangkok, or what Bangkok once was, in a meaningful way. Pitchaya Sudbanthad’s story of Bangkok is the most complete and engrossing tale of this megacity of fifteen million souls ever portrayed in a single publication. ![]()
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