Read: Sightseeing by Rattawut Lapcharoensap

You know when you read a short story collection where you are moved and swept up by every story and when it ends you stare into space for a while, processing the journey, your heart full of writerly admiration?  For me, Sightseeing by Rattawut Lapcharoensap was one of those collections.

Lapcharoensap had what he calls a “geographically hyperactive” childhood, moving between USA and Thailand.  The stories are set in Thailand, and the economy of international tourism is a frequent theme, as is class, corruption, and the way people fail each other.  The stories in the collection are dark and beautiful and witty and astonishing and funny.   In the haunting title story, a son and his mother, who is going blind, become tourists for the first time and embark on a two day journey south to see “the slimmest part of the slimmest peninsula in the world, the Indian and Pacific crashing against both shores.  The earth is a tightrope, our train speeds across the flat thin wire.”  All of the characters are richly and vividly rendered, but my favorite is Ladda, the teenage girl who narrates the novella that caps the collection; when she drives off at the end, all I could think was, “No! Wait! Take me with you!”

Sadly, the only book many people have read set in Thailand is The Beach, in which Thailand exists as an exotic locale for white people seeking a white utopian paradise, valuable only for its scenery, its people irrelevant.  If you haven’t read Sightseeing yet, please do.