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‘Bangkok Wakes to Rain’: A stunning debut novel from Pitchaya Sudbanthad

This beautifully written, multilayered novel weaves a tale from the lives of several people living in the past, present, and near future around the Thai capital. It brings the people and the place -- and their ghosts -- wonderfully alive.

Pitchaya Sudbanthad, author of "Bangkok Wakes to Rain."
Pitchaya Sudbanthad, author of "Bangkok Wakes to Rain."Read moreLeft: CHristine Suewon Lee

Bangkok Wakes to Rain

By Pitchaya Sudbanthad

Riverhead Books. 360 pp. $27

Reviewed by Colette Bancroft

Sometimes a novel draws us in because it strikes a chord from our own experience, because we identify with its characters or have lived in its setting and feel at home in its story. Other novels do the opposite, transporting us to a place or time wholly unfamiliar and for that reason fascinating. Bangkok Wakes to Rain, the stunning debut novel by Pitchaya Sudbanthad, was, for me, the latter kind of book, one that creates a world so rich and alive I wanted to swim in it.

It’s a book filled with water, thanks to Bangkok’s climate and geography and, perhaps, its coming fate. The novel’s structure could be modeled on a watershed, separate streams of story feeding into one another until they become a river that flows across more than a century and the lives of many characters.

Sudbanthad was born in Thailand and raised in Saudi Arabia and the United States. Now a New York resident, he brings a cosmopolitan perspective and a native’s deep affection to his portrait of Bangkok and its people. Much of the book’s power lies in its language and imagery, on full display in its lovely first paragraph:

Always, she arrives near evening. The last few children in blue-and-white uniforms have finished their after-school work and are plodding along in small gangs or, like her, alone. They don’t take notice of her; they have screens in their hands, shoves and teasing to repay, snacks bagged in newsprint to grease up their fingers. In their trail sparrows tussle over fallen fried crumbs and biscuit sticks trampled to powder by little shoes. …

The novel at first seems like a collection of linked short stories, with characters who appear to be connected only by the city. Many of them live, in various eras, in a house built more than a century ago as a merchant’s mansion. As the novel moves into the present and then several decades into the future, the site will be overtaken by a condominium building that preserves the house’s facade in its lobby, an architectural ghost of the past in a modern metropolis.

Bangkok Wakes to Rain is itself a sort of house of ghosts and those haunted by them, in a cycle of vivid life and aching loss. Sudbanthad writes, "The forgotten return again and again, as new names and faces, and again this city makes new ghosts." If any one story dominates the book, it’s that of a woman named Nee. We meet her in the early 1970s, a time of political upheaval under the rule of a brutal dictator. Then a young nursing student, she falls in love with another student, Siripohng.

In one of the book’s most moving chapters, the arc of their courtship shimmers to life and ends in tragedy. When the military attacks hundreds of thousands of demonstrating students with bombs and gunfire, Nee survives by plunging into Chao Phraya, the river that runs through Bangkok. She will surface in many other chapters, her life taking surprising turns.

Some of the novel’s characters are Westerners who come to Thailand for what they think will be only a little while. The chapters that stretch farthest back in history concern Phineas Stevens, an American doctor who comes to what was then Siam in the late 1900s to work at a mission hospital and is overwhelmed by the “heathen city.”

Among the most affecting chapters are those about an American jazz pianist, Clyde Alston. He first appears when he’s hired to perform a sort of musical exorcism of the mansion. He’s told that a medium “counts twenty or so spirits in the pillar. They visit me in my dreams, and I’m tired of it. A woman my age needs her sound sleep.” Clyde wishes he could exorcise his own ghost, a beloved he lost touch with years ago: “The most deafening thing he’s ever heard is the silence between two people.”

Near the novel’s end, Sudbanthad moves several decades into the future. A preservationist named Woon works in a building that “floats ten kilometers west of his neighborhood, anchored to a network of piers in the newly formed sea.” His work is the rescue of artifacts from places now submerged by rising oceans, everything from stone lions and golden Buddhas to “letters from the dead to the long forgotten.” Each one is “blipped” by technology that preserves its three-dimensional image so it will live on digitally even if the object is destroyed.

Such "capture" is also used on a much larger scale. Woon’s mother, in her 70s and in failing health, uses the technology to visit a relative, both of them transported to the condominium built around the old house. It’s re-created for them in every detail — right down to one of its ghosts — out of the technologically harvested memories of countless other inhabitants.

Like the technology Sudbanthad imagines, this novel beautifully brings a place and its people alive.

This review originally appeared in the Tampa Bay Times .