'This is the city where people come to live," the novelist Gary Indiana wrote about New York City, but, he sarcastically added, "You'd think they were here to die." Indiana's novel, titled Do Everything In The Dark, explored the petty neuroses of a group of artists and writers who are living out a post-success purgatory in the city that never weeps. Doubt and resentment consumes them.
It's not hard to imagine that the inverse of this quote might be true for a certain class of expat in Bangkok: This is the city where people come to die, you'd think we were here to live.
Foreign artists and writers traditionally don't come to Bangkok to "make it", but once here and free of, well, the petty neuroses that can afflict such ambition, respond to the city as less an entity to surrender to than one to be discovered and rediscovered without the pressured expectations of others.
Lawrence Osborne's book Bangkok Days (Vintage 2010) is a discursive journey through Bangkok over a mostly indistinguishable period of time. Places and sites meld as he moves between the Oriental Hotel's Bamboo Bar, a "no-hands" restaurant, the gruesome delights of a forensics museum, daily encounters with architectural oddities, and compelling shrines. He checks familiar eccentricities, such as the street of bars named after famous French Impressionists, and reveals the interest of other aspects of the city: the intense anonymity of the streets of On Nut or the secret slaughterhouse that is buried in a slum neighbourhood.
Osborne is a widely published fiction writer, journalist and essayist based in Bangkok. His work has been published in The New Yorker, WSJ Magazine, Playboy and Salon, among others. He has just completed a novel about Macau, due to be published next year.
Tell me about the response to Bangkok Days.
The response was a delightful surprise. I had expected it to be attacked by people who disapproved of the sexual elements, but not at all. I intended a melancholic book and not the usual "noir" stuff, and I think that intention came through. I didn't get any negative reviews, which is surprising to me. Occasionally I'm stopped by readers who recognise the jacket photo and some have become quite good friends as a result, though none of them live here. I can't say that's happened before.
Which literary precedents did you draw on?
I couldn't find any precedents set here. Bangkok writers usually stick to the noir genre, writing about the bargirl and drugs scene. I enjoy that genre, but I wanted to do something different.
The rest of the city seems left out in novels written in English. I love Henry Miller's Quiet Days In Clichy and I guess that was my model here. But I had to invent a new form to do it, somewhere between the short story and the memoir.
Please discuss any writing on Bangkok that has been of particular interest to you.
Philip Cornwel-Smith is writing in a way that I like, with an electric eye for the streets. I liked the first novel of John Burdett's series Bangkok 8, which is filled with interesting observations. Christopher Moore is a good writer. I haven't read most of the other noir guys. There is a wonderful Paul Bowles story called You Have Left Your Lotus Pods On The Bus, which I guess was written in the 1960s. He planned to live here, but never made it.
You posted a notice about this on Facebook and said you think Bowles should have lived here. Please expand on this. I ask because foreign writers here more typically mention Marguerite Duras.
I think Bowles would have relished the depth, richness and paradoxes of Bangkok, and the way that "farangs" misunderstand it. Bangkok's strangeness _ sometimes beautiful and sinister _ would have appealed to him. And you can imagine certain stories happening here that you could not imagine happening in the US _ there is a danger about this city, or unpredictability.
Duras, meanwhile, writes about the Vietnam of her childhood, so I see what they mean _ I am a great admirer of her. But would her minimalism have worked in a place as brash and fast as Bangkok?
How conscious are you that Bangkok Days uses certain tropes from foreign depictions of Bangkok: a great attention to the details of the city, a concern with its visceral and sensational aspects, and the sense that an observer/writer of your class is alone or singular here.
I am extremely aware of it. But there was no way to avoid it. I am, after all, a farang. A Thai would never write a book like this, and would never need to. My Thai friends are a little mystified by it and tease me endlessly about it. But the intended audience is English-speaking: it's a book in and about the English language. And also, I dare say, about me. This is the only confessional book I'll ever write.
I've known foreign writers and artists who hide out in Bangkok, not seeking to contribute to local cultural scenes. Why do you think this is so?
The local cultural scene is hard to access for foreigners, unless they work in a purely visual medium or speak truly fluent Thai. If you learned Thai late in life it will not be fluent, however good you think it is. And I have the impression that Thais, while exceptionally open-minded and adaptable with regard to the outside world, are not passionately interested in it or us. That's fair enough. Anyhow, writers are solitary by nature. So living here is a place to be alone and concentrate. I feel the same when I am in Paris.
You first visited in 1990 and now live here. How has the city changed?
It seems to me wealthier and more confident, less attuned to American pop culture and more orientated towards other parts of Asia. You can feel how much more powerful the region has become. Many things have not changed, though I confess I am mystified by the disappearance of elephants from the streets.
