Nu när jag tänker efter så ska jag ju åka till Frankrike den 24:e maj och när jag kommer hem den 31:e maj ska jag tydligen till Serbien en vecka. Detta är dock inte säkert ännu, men det kommer troligen fastställas snart. Det betyder att jag inte kommer kunna nörda vid datorn länge flera dagar snart :( Det händer så mycket bra och dåliga grejer på bara en månad. Jag ska resa till massa ställen, Köpenhamn den 8:e maj, Frankrike 24:e maj, Serbien 1:e juni (kanske)! Vi får se hur det blir, jag återkommer såklart innan allt är bestämmt.
I helgen ska jag och mamma åka till Borås för att hälsa på en gammal väninna till mamma. Det känns lite udda men samtidigt spännande. Jag hoppas jag kommer kunna träffa Crystal på fredagen, då hon tydligen ska vara borta resten av helgen. Funderar på om jag borde ta med mig plugg till Borås eller hur det blir med det.
Igår läste jag klart boken Sightseeing av Rattawut Lapcharoensap. Den boken har nu officiellt blivit en av mina favoriter tillsammans med A million little pieces of Memoirs of a geisha. Dessa två böcker rekommenderar jag också varmt, men framförallt Sightseeing! Den är SÅ läsvärd! Här följer en liten recenssion med bild:
"Jan 24, 2005 "I remember Ma telling me as a child that Thailand was only a paradise for fools and farangs, for criminals and foreigners," says the narrator of "Sightseeing," the title story in Rattawut Lapcharoensap's first collection. Like many of the other narrative voices here, this one belongs to a Thai boy who's too young to be embittered toward the constant influx of tourists and old enough to desire closeness to them, a cusp-walker who guides us readers, tourists ourselves, through a Thailand little seen. In seven stories we get the most unparadisaical glimpse of gangs and cockfights, whores and shantytowns, thrust up against sandy beaches and mango trees. It's the distance between that outsider's paradise and the native's often grim reality that Lapcharoensap shows us in his tales, so tenderly crafted and beautifully realized that they'll snuggle up behind your heart and stay there for a long time.
Lapcharoensap, a 25-year-old Thai who was born in Chicago and raised in Bangkok, renders the sometimes brutal sadness of living between Thailand and the West in two of the most biting stories, starting with "Farangs," the first in the collection. ("Farang" means "Caucasian," and like the Hindi "farangi" or the Indonesian "bule," is often used derisively.) The narrator again is an adolescent boy, a son of a Thai motel owner and an absent American sergeant, who falls constantly and innocently in love with the farang girls who stay at their island inn, believing, always wrongly, that he can be something more than a vacation fling to them. In "At the Café Lovely," the narrator's big brother takes him out for a birthday treat at an American fast-food joint; they wear their best clothes and stand in line, the younger brother daydreaming an experience not unlike a McDonald's commercial: "We would look like those university students I had seen through the floor-to-ceiling windows, the ones who laughed and sipped their sodas. Afterward, we would walk into the summer sun with soft-serve sundaes, my brother's arm around my shoulder." Later, the brother will take him to the Café Lovely, where the promise of the English name will ironically belie a night of sniffing paint thinner and sneaking off with prostitutes.
Other stories take us deeper into Thai life. The titular character of "Priscilla the Cambodian" is a wild little girl with gold teeth, a refugee whom the narrator befriends and who inadvertently introduces him, when locals burn down the Cambodian shantytown, to adult fear and hatred. In "Draft Day," the narrator goes with his best friend to a compulsory draft lottery. His parents have bribed an official to fix the lottery in his favor, but his friend has no such protection, and it's his dawning sense of guilt and betrayal that pushes the narrative, up to the moment when the friend is drafted, shaved and sent to the army. It's a difficult feat to hold a reader's attention when we know what is going to happen, but Lapcharoensap succeeds by drawing us in with the details: the beads of sweat on the boys' faces, the parents standing on the sidelines, watching as their sons are taken away from them.
The first five stories are all told from the point of view of young boys with similar voices, and this has a comforting effect. One of the difficulties in reading a short story collection is that, just as you get used to a particular voice, it abruptly changes, and "Sightseeing" provides a nice change from typical collections for that reason. Lapcharoensap's boy narrators are so fully realized that you want to stay with them, even when the towns, back stories and plots around them change. They are sweetly innocent and often brutal in that innocence, barely blinking at the adult tragedies unfolding around them. ("When children learn to acknowledge the gravity of their loved ones' sorrows they're no longer children," says the little brother of "At the Café Lovely," and the sentiment perfectly sums up the behavior of the child narrators who barely acknowledge their parents' misery, smoldering in the background.) "
