Bangkok Wakes to Rain
SynopsisPlot
A missionary doctor pines for his native New England even as he succumbs to the vibrant chaos of nineteenth-century Siam. A post-World War II society woman marries, mothers, and holds court, little suspecting her solitary fate. A jazz pianist in the age of rock, haunted by his own ghosts, is summoned to appease the house's resident spirits. In the present, a young woman tries to outpace the long shadow of her political past. And in a New Krungthep yet to come, savvy teenagers row tourists past landmarks of the drowned old city they themselves do not remember. Time collapses as these lives collide and converge, linked by the forces voraciously making and remaking the amphibious, ever-morphing capital itself.
Story
About this book
A house in Bangkok anchors this novel across two centuries and into an imagined future. Pitchaya Sudbanthad follows a sequence of loosely connected characters whose lives pass through or near the same site as the city transforms around them. Among them are a nineteenth-century missionary doctor from New England, drawn deeper into the unfamiliar rhythms of Siam despite his homesickness, and a society woman in the years after World War II whose composed life conceals a fate she cannot foresee.
Later inhabitants include a jazz pianist called in during the 1970s to play music that might calm the spirits said to occupy the house, even as he contends with his own past. In a more recent Bangkok, a young woman teaching swimming lessons in the luxury condominiums that replaced the old structure tries to distance herself from a difficult political history. Further ahead in time, the city has partially flooded, and teenagers ferry tourists through the waterlogged ruins of a capital they never knew firsthand.
The novel treats Bangkok as a living, unstable organism, shaped by water, politics, development, and memory. Each storyline occupies a distinct era, but the characters share a recurring pull between attachment and displacement, between holding on to a place and watching it become something else.
