1Q1A Pitchaya Sudbanthad Bangkok Wakes to Rain

Good afternoon everyone and welcome to another edition of The Avid Reader. Today our guest is Pitchaya (pitch eye a) Sudbanthad (soot banth odd) author of Bangkok Wakes To Rain, published this month by Riverhead.Bangkok Wakes To Rain is Pitchaya’s first novel. He has received Fellowships in fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the McDowell Colony and is the fiction editor for The Conundrum Engine Literary Review. He spends time in both Bangkok and Brooklyn._______________________________________Bangkok Wakes To Rain is a difficult novel to explain. It has no epigraph but if it did, it would be “It is only so”. Those words describe not only the book’s thematic course but they also give us a good idea of what our hustling and bustling, our hither and yon amount to in our everyday waking lives. “It is only so”.Back to the book itself, it weaves, it dances, it describes a city in its past, present and future incarnations. While our chief narrator is Jee, from time to time the protagonist becomes a flock of birds, or an aging jazz musician who is tied to Krunthemp, the name of the city we call Bangkok.The prose is much as in The Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, something I thought of early on and then was satisfied to read it compared to that book in many of the reviews.It’s the collapse of time, illusory or not that draws us in, awaiting the next course, the next tense, the next world.