A review by ridgewaygirl
Bangkok Wakes to Rain by Pitchaya Sudbanthad

5.0

What to say about this gorgeous, gorgeous novel? It takes the form of tightly inter-linked stories about two people who meet and have a child, but also backwards in time to colonial Siam, forwards into the future, connecting with their families histories and futures. Nee is a young woman, a university student who marches in the protests in the mid-seventies and survives the violent response. She later meets a photographer and tentatively forms a connection with him, carefully not speaking about what she can't bear to talk about. Her sister has moved to Japan where she owns and runs a Thai restaurant popular with Thai students and expats, but the shadow of the violence reaches her in Tokyo. A missionary from New England despairs of doing anything worthwhile in Siam and writes asking to be reassigned, even as he begins exploring the city he's stranded in. Three children ferry a woman through the now-flooded streets of Bangkok. She wants to see the place her family once lived, back when Bangkok had not been covered by the ocean.

The novel begins with what first look like unrelated short stories, but that eventually resolve themselves into a coherent narrative. It's a wonderful format when it's well-deployed as it is here, Sudbanthad builds the novel in layers of history; of his characters, but also of Bangkok itself. It's such a pleasurable thing to read a well-crafted and superbly written novel where every chapter is carefully placed into the greater whole and yet can stand on its own.