The Sad Part Was, Prabda Yoon

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language: Thai (English tr. Mui Poopoksakul)
country: Thailand
year: 2000
form: short fiction
genre(s): literary, speculative, archrealism
dates read: 23.8.22

Prabda Yoon’s The Sad Part Was (tr. Mui Poopoksakul) was an unexpectedly very quick read. it’s a collection of twelve short stories, originally published in 2000 and at times very much in that zeitgeist (the final story, “Found”, is in fact set on Y2K eve). it’s got some wackiness to it but I would not give it the hypothetical “wacky” mood tag.

I enjoyed it overall, but there were only a few stories I’d say I loved. the highlights for me were “Pen in Parentheses” (I liked the formal conceit and I liked the way it was having fun with Dracula) and “The Disappearance of a She-Vampire in Pattaya” (oof!), but I also found “Snow for Mother” affecting even though it was kind of cheesy, and “Marut by the Sea” was fun but ultimately was only different in degree from the Víctor Goti prologue to Niebla, so it didn’t wow me. I really wanted to like “Shallow/Deep, Thick/Thin”, but I think it needed just a little more substance. oh, wait, and I also loved the language use in “Something in the Air” — it must have been a blast to translate.

• “Pen in Parentheses”: a man who’s preparing to pack up his grandmother’s house reflects on his and his grandparents’ lives, partly through the Bela Lugosi Dracula
• “The Disappearance of a She-Vampire in Pattaya”: a vampire who police deny exists vanishes after getting into a car with a tourist. grim but compelling look at — implicitly — the violence of sex tourism.
• “Snow for Mother”: a middle-aged woman whose son has an obsession with snow plans to take him to Alaska so he can see it for the first time, in hopes that this will break the obsession.
• “Marut by the Sea”: Marut, a named but as-yet-undescribed character, rails against the tyranny and stupidity of Prabda Yoon, that pretentious but ultimately talentless hack author.
• “Shallow/Deep, Thick/Thin”: a traveler finds something from space in the Thai countryside and attempts to describe his discovery (“the secret”) to the world, only to find the media has already taken the words out of his mouth.

“Miss Space” — about a guy who sees a woman writing with weird inter-word spacing and gets obsessed with the implications of the giant gaps between words and sentences in her notebook — I think suffered from its protagonist crowding out the title character (who barely gets to say anything); the end was interesting but fell a bit flat for me.

anyway, I had fun with the book overall! if you like vaguely weird and occasionally speculative short fiction in the vein of, like, Karen Russell, you might enjoy this. I have his other collection in translation, too, and intend to read it sometime soon.

moods: lighthearted, reflective, sad

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