A literary milestone

So, it’s finally come through the post after a long wait: วรรณมาลัย (Wannamarlai), an anthology of outstanding Thai short stories written between 1932 and 2010, officially published last September by the Ministry of Culture’s Office of Contemporary Art and Culture. Apparently the ministry’s website is still suffering from the Great Flood, as it has yet to announce the birth – and there’s no picture of the flowery cover to be culled anywhere on the net.

Of course, even more eagerly awaited is the second tome: the same stories translated into English, to be published … later this year, budget willing.

Also in the OCAC pipeline: English translations of three novels: ฝั่งแสงจันทร์ (Fang Saengjan – The moonlit shore) by Prachakom Lunachai, ปลายนาฟ้าเขียว (Plai Na Fa Khiao – literally Green sky at the end of the rice field) by Wat Wanlayangkoon and ชะบน (Chabon) by Thirayut Daojanthuek. The latter almost made it into my list of ‘the 20 best Thai novels’ some two decades ago, along with Nippan’s Pheesuea Lae Dorkmai (Butterflies and flowers): I found it a bit too narrow in scope and at times long-winded, even though it’s written beautifully.

Forget the cheap paper and the cramming of its 560 pages with print too small for tired eyes: this is a treasure trove of some of the best short fiction ever published in Thailand in the eyes of a dozen Thai literary luminaries. Besides, it’s free.
Get yourself a copy while stocks last, through ocac.go.th.

This ‘literary garland’, as the title translates, lines up 41 stories by 41 writers, only six of them female. Many of the names are well known and feature in all anthologies, but here with an alternative story. For instance, Dorkmai Sot has a one-page story rather than her regular ‘Phonlamueang Dee’ (The good citizen, which I featured some time ago in my bilingual blog). I’ve just read that page and am left perplexed: was that her next best effort?
Others are less known but will welcome the exposure (and incite jealousy). A few I’ve heard of but have yet to read, and who is Nat Sartsongwit? No matter how I spell the name in English, Google won’t tell me. I’ll read his story next.
There are some surprising absences – major writers of the past such as Yacob, Malai Choophinit and Humorist, all, I’m told, dismissed under the far-fetched claim that they borrowed most of their plots from western stories (what is Kukrit Pramoj doing here then?); and top contemporary short-story writers as well, none of whom more laughably dismissed than Chart Korbjitti as allegedly having penned no outstanding story!
Ditto for Wimon Sainimnuan or Thatsanawadee, among others.
The lengthy, informative introduction protects the selection committee from controversy over absent worthy writers by claiming problems with copyrights. Yeah, right, I sympathise: Bunluea is another noticeable absentee.

To the future volume of English translations I’m to contribute four stories, translated at various times in the past fifteen years: Seni Saowapong’s ‘The lone sunflower’ (available on my bilingual blog); Sila Komchai’s ‘Blood buds’ (published in Caravan in 1994); Phaithoon Thanya’s ‘A death in the month of October’; and Chatcharin Chaiwat’s ‘Boy’s reporter’ (at OCAC’s request) – the latter two featured in 11 Thai short stories – 2011 now available at thaifiction.com.
I was surprised by the listing in the anthology of a fifth story, ‘The wish’ by Prachakom Lunachai, a rather corny short story I translated some time ago for the Bangkok Post. Obviously, it’ll be translated by someone else, and it’ll be interesting to compare the two versions.

The downside of this volume for me is that, promising as it may be in its scope, variety and literary quality, I may not translate those stories I find most interesting, unless the translations to be published are dismal. I reckon we’ll have to wait and see.

An innocent abroad – 2

And then it was time to fly back.

At 4pm on the 18^th, having long booked a late flight to Orly and a room at the Ibis Orly hotel in order to catch the next day’s 10am flight to KL, I was informed that the flight was delayed … to 7:30pm – only to be rescheduled overnight to 10:20pm – more than twelve hours altogether.
(The airline’s only gesture was to provide us with a free dinner around 7:30pm at the airport; when a night’s airborne rest later we were woken up three hours before landing, AA didn’t have the decency to offer coffee or fruit juice to passengers free of charge but those who had paid for it in advance got their dinner … at 8am French and body time. Feeling like puking at the salmon’s fumes, I returned mine and literally had to beg for a cup of hot black coffee – got one without being charged five rupiah I didn’t have and was probably the only one on the plane to be such favoured. On the KL–Bangkok flight, feeling ravenous after dieting for thirteen hours, I asked for any makan I would pay for. All set dishes were sold out. I ended up with a bowl of noodles – 60 baht, 1.5 euros.)

At 5pm on the 18^th still in Toulouse, I went out to buy a 20cl flask of pastis at the Casino shop on avenue de Lavaur to drink later that night and maybe the next day in the late hours at Orly. At 8pm, a Blagnac airport goon ‘confiscated’ it, claiming that only 10cl of ‘liquid’ was allowed. There is no 10cl pastis for sale. The stooge threatened me with arrest and detention when I uncorked the flask and poured some pastis into his water goblet. I had to let him have it. I thought too late I should have spit in it before relinquishing it.

The liquid rule absurdity was never more obvious than later in the trip, when I got a small plastic bottle of water on board the AA flight to KL, drank most of it and then slipped it into my bag, only to have it ‘confiscated’ prior to the AA connecting flight to Bangkok. There wasn’t even 10cl of liquid left in it. Plain, clear drinking water, for fuck’s sake!

In the long hours of waiting at Orly airport the next day, I befriended a French pastry cook based in the Langkawi and told him about the pastis flask, among many other anecdotes we exchanged about customs madness. He had paid through the nose for 30kg of baggage, he said, and besides had marzipan in his cabin luggage. I felt exultant when, meeting him again past the checkpoint, he told me that, upon his marzipan being ‘confiscated’, he had remembered my remark about spitting and deliberately dropped the marzipan to the floor and stepped on it before handing it over with a grin.
I do wish more would behave like him, and actively show their displeasure instead of behaving like sheep. It’s quite dispiriting witnessing crowds of travellers going hastily through the motions of shearing themselves of metal to get that silliness everyone resents over with a.s.a.p. or enduring the pilfering of their belongings without ever bleating. They are as complicit in their misery as those who, enjoying their modicum of power by the book, enforce it on them by claiming that these are the rules and there’s nothing they can do about it – which is what torturers big and small the world over always reply as if they had no mind of their own, no common sense and no humanity. Starting with drinking water, you end up with Buchenwald.

At Orly, the checking of my bag produced another item of contention: a three-year-old small tube of shaving cream which I was told was exactly the size of some terrorist device, but had been taken off the list of dangerous items only last month. Ah, then, those silly rules can be changed?

I’ve kept the height of drollery for the end: you may remember Chart Korbjitti’s and my cheese chokes at the hands of the Paris Roissy vulture the last time we ventured out (‘Une histoire de fromages’, 22.10.2009). This time, chat échaudé, I didn’t bother feeding the creatures. But only weeks earlier, my daughter had to face them.
Thanks to her end-of-year bonus, she had gone to see her grandfather for a week and left him one week before he died. On the return trip, she made the mistake of putting a hermetic translucent box of stinking cheese her father loves into her cabin luggage instead of her suitcases. There were four sorts of cheese: camembert, reblochon, maroilles and munster. At Roissy, the vultures lectured her on cheese. There were two sorts of cheese, they lied: firm cheese, allowed, and soft cheese, verboten. Whereupon they deemed camembert and reblochon soft cheeses and ‘confiscated’ them and let her (me) have the firm maroilles and munster. How kind of them! How humane! May they call their swindling Blagnac colleague, start on my pilfered pastis and rot their guts in hell!

An innocent abroad – 1

 

At 3am on Thursday 4 January, my brother called from Toulouse to say our 94-year-old father had just died. Burial would take place as soon as I arrived. I immediately went on the net to try to book a seat on the Air France flight in the evening of the same day. No such thing. The first flight was on the next evening, which meant arriving in Toulouse Saturday morning.
(By the way, a single fare with an open return for Bangkok–Paris–Toulouse isn’t an option either; a single fare comes to over 1600 euros, whereas a two-week return fare is as low as a little over 1000 euros – go figure.)
By 10am, my resourceful daughter had booked me on an Air Asia round trip leaving Bangkok at 4pm for Kuala Lumpur and arriving at Paris Orly on Friday morning (local time) – for less than a thousand euros, including one dinner on the return trip (on ‘cheap’ Air Asia, one pays extra for meals, baggage, onboard entertainment, blanket and what-have-you, even water).

It turned out to be the most expensive, longest and lousiest return trip to France I’ve ever experienced.
One piece of advice: do not take Air Asia on long flights. (Actually, Air Asia flights to Europe and even to India from here are due to be phased out next month.)

All my life, a third of it as a reporter, I’ve prided myself on travelling the world with only one piece of hand luggage, which had me shun at some cost those functions where a three-piece suit was de rigueur. So, I packed a bag in a hurry, turned down the fellow who was arriving to install a toilet forthwith, locked the house and ran to the airport, to soon find out that, in this insane time and age, cabin luggage only is no longer an option: panicky post-7/11 regulations applied stupidly, whimsically and/or dishonestly make sure of that.

In the course of a 24-hour trip, I was treated to no fewer than four luggage checks and two body searches. (Only three luggage checks and no body search on the 48-hour return trip.) My bag was full of potentially murderous weapons, I discovered as I went along.
The fun started at the Bangkok checkpoint, by far the most stupidly thorough of them all (it’s the only one that had us take off our shoes, slippers included, for x-ray inspection – Malaysians didn’t bother; the French, reasonably enough given the weather, checked only high-heeled shoes).
Right away, three used items were ‘confiscated’, in the name of ‘international rules’: a bottle of doctor-prescribed shampoo, expensive and hard to replace; a flask of (cheap) after-shave lotion; and, believe it or not, a tube of Parodontax® toothpaste. No teeth-brushing for the next 24 hours.
(On the return trip, I made a point of introducing a new tube of toothpaste in my bag: it went totally unnoticed and surprisingly no plane exploded in mid-air.)
Somehow, there and elsewhere, I was allowed to keep a razor and its blades, my toothbrush and my faithful biro, with any of which I could definitely kill if I had a mind to.
If the next terrorist attack uses loaded underwear, will we be asked to strip or have ours ‘confiscated’?

In KL, entering the transit area straight after disembarking astonishingly required a new hand luggage search on top of the passport examination – and of course the same rigmarole before making it into the plane to Paris.

At Orly, I coughed up an extra 136 euros for ‘la navette’ to Toulouse – and was informed that there was no seat available in the early morning of the day I was due to return: I’d have to catch a flight the night before and book a room for the night in a hotel or spend the night in the TGV (actually, no such option). I can’t remember what it is they ‘confiscated’ for that flight – ah, yes, not quite: a bottle of water I was asked to drink up.

When I arrived in Toulouse, it was to learn that the burial would take place … on Monday.

And realise that, in my haste to leave, I’d forgotten the list of phone numbers of my friends in the EU. I definitely felt clandestine and castoff.
To top it all, warning me that some imposter was trying to use my messagerie from France, gmail locked me out! It took five days to convince them that the imposter was me.

For two weeks, hard labour offset the freezing cold: the burial in the village of my birth amid desiccated ghosts (‘Don’t you remember me? The last time I saw you you were nine, reading a book under the marronnier.’); the emptying of the dead man’s house, throwing away, giving away, stocking away; the scrubbing and reshaping of my brother’s much neglected house; and the kneading of my brother’s morale: he’d been on the receiving end of his insufferably ailing hence bellicose, incontinent father day and night for months and months and was suddenly back into his own skin and finding it empty.