Thai author transforms recent history into intimate fables
Veeraporn Nitiprapha may be the most significant writer you have never heard of. Her first novel, "The Blind Earthworm in the Labyrinth," was a surprise hit. The original Thai-language edition sold 200,000 copies in a country where reading culture (usually focused on the sayings of monks or stock market tips) was considered weak even before smartphone scanning. According to Kong Rithdee, a leading film critic and writer who translates Veeraporn's work, "Nobody knows why the book became so popular. But after the coup of 2014, it expressed the emotions of a lot of young people -- a romantic despair connected to the labyrinth that is Thailand."
Although it won the 2015 S.E.A. Write Award -- Southeast Asia's leading literature prize -- it did not appear in English for another three years, when it was published by Bangkok-based River Books. Reviewers, including The New York Times correspondent in Bangkok, universally praised the novel, although in terms that warned of its complexity. It was variously described as "feverish," "dreamy," "magical and meandering," and, a "malarial hallucination ... turning its readers into the earthworms."
The two long-suffering sisters at the heart of the story, Chalika and Chareeya, have entered local lore, while Veeraporn's work has been compared to everything from classical Thai epics to Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "One Hundred Years of Solitude." The author herself cites the influence of the novel that spurred Marquez -- the surreal, ghost-driven "Pedro Paramo," by the Mexican author Juan Rulfo.
Her next novel, another family saga, "Memories of the Memories of the Black Rose Cat," made Veeraporn the first female author to win a second consecutive S.E.A. Write Award. It has also just been released in English. Its translator describes the book as "a better novel, packed with stories within stories, more profound -- and therefore not as popular."
In a tale as heavily plotted as it is claustrophobically intimate, the novel goes even farther into uncompromising poetics as it tells the saga of a Thai-Chinese family's search identity for amid corruption, from Chinatown to the imagined provincial outpost of Pad Siew, spanning the 1910s to the 1970s (making the evanescence of memory a recurring factor). Generational strands are woven through the viewpoints of awakening children, storytelling grannies, untethered internal and external dialogues, legends and curses, with both birds and household objects made symbolically rich.
"My writing is like a lab, where I put people in, put situations in, make it up bit by bit," says the author, who is known by the nickname Mam. "If a family can't tell enough, I kill the whole family. Boom -- earthquake!"
This 58-year-old lifelong Bangkok resident is a former advertising copywriter and fashion magazine journalist. She confesses she began writing novels at age 44 to impress her bookish son and as an antidote to "telling lies" in her previous jobs by "giving hope to people only by making them buy things." She seems to revel in her creative freedom as much as any newfound fame.
"My books are the kind you love or you hate. Either you can't get through them or, as I have been told by some, you keep going back to them 10 times over." She acknowledges that some of her references may puzzle non-Thai readers. but "you can't consider any of that. If, with everyone so globalized, they don't know about mango and sticky rice, that's their problem." Read More…
