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Our Assessment:
B : effective presentation and often appealing loose vision See our review for fuller assessment.
From the Reviews: - Return to top of the page - The complete review's Review:
The Blind Earthworm in the Labyrinth is set in modern Thailand, mostly in Nakhon Chai Si, near Bangkok.
The central characters are Chalika and her three year younger sister Chareeya; another figure, Pran, who has a peripatetic childhood, eventually settles near them and becomes a significant presence in their lives much of the time.
To the girls, Father's existence was a mystifying phenomenon: he was a transparent entity they could almost see through. He would show up silently at random corners of the house and disappear without a trace when no one was looking.The father's great passion was for another woman -- a story that is only fully revealed deep into the novel, in a splendid chapter that describes that woman's fate through the lingering traces of her name (Rosarin), a small vortex of narrative typical for a novel that circles around in time and whose individual chapters are themselves often like eddies. He eventually falls ill, and dies; for a year after that the girls' mother "sat from dawn to dusk above the grave of the only man she had ever loved. [...] To be certain he would never rest in peace"; then she died, too, when Chalika was barely a teen. The household is taken over by Uncle Thanit, who had gone to study in Japan, fallen in love and married (twice), and had owned a record store near Kyoto. He comes to Nakhon Chai Si with sixty-three boxes -- "fifty-five of them filled with vinyl records, eight packed with books" -- and settles in. He introduces classical music into the household, and music comes to play a large role in the novel -- including with Pran, by then already a neighbor, eventually forming a band (which he names, almost predictably, given the general tenor of the novel: 'Broken Soul'). The narrative swirls around different episodes and times in the characters' lives, agreeably intense and evocative, even as the general sense, of almost all their lives, is one of drift. Like the father who was practically just a spectral presence, the characters, even when they show intense passions and interests, drift through life. At the extremes, Uncle Thanit withdraws to a monastery, while the adult Pran long travels aimlessly about. And even the dead sometimes linger: the villagers can still see the girls' mother years after her death (but not the girls: "the inhabitants of the house couldn't, both when she was dead but also when she was still alive; transparent, intangible, unaware of the eyes peering at her from the wall"). Chalika is the most settled of the characters, remaining in Nakhon Chai Si, and long running a successful dessert shop. She is a beautiful woman, but remains oblivious to all the heads she turns; she: "glowed with the magical aura of a literary heroine, complete with fortitude, virtue and patience" but barely registers that she could play a much larger role of her own in real life, preferring to withdraw into the books she's passionately devoured since she became: "a sworn reader of romance novels when she was barely ten". Her sister Chareeya has always had many more interests -- even if she didn't really stick to any of her passions for long, as she: "wanted to be something new every day". Chareeya experiences more from life, including having love affairs; for quite a while she works at a CD shop in Bangkok. Among the men in her life is Natee, who pretends to be a freelance journalist, and stays apart from Chareeya for extended periods of time, pretending to be on foreign assignments: "that was who he really was, Natee wasn't acting. He believed with genuine conviction that he really was a war correspondent" -- yet another character who is, in yet another way, adrift. Other characters also come to the fore at times, including the girls' nanny Nual, who matures into her own odd family, three men sharing fatherhood of her five children in an unusual but functioning arrangement. But The Blind Earthworm in the Labyrinth always circles back to and around Chalika and Chareeya and Pran; so also in its conclusion. Typically, when Chareeya returns to the family home after a longer absence: Chalika had hardly eaten in the past few months and had become so small that Chareeya was confused as to whether or not her sister had reverted to a ten-year-old self.While The Blind Earthworm in the Labyrinth isn't quite circular there is a timeless feel to much of what happens -- and to many of the characters -- and even as the story in a sense progresses, with the characters aging, as important is the underlying sameness of so much. The chapters don't quite neatly follow on one another, as Veeraporn builds them up individually -- but there is so much overlap, and so much of the same foundations (often incidental, but omnipresent), that the novel does feel satisfyingly whole. A touch of the fantastical -- presented as so natural and normal that it doesn't feel awkwardly exaggerated -- and the way whole lives are contained here makes for a quite rich novel, bigger than its actual size. The general feeling of drift -- in characters and action -- might bother some who prefer more certainty to their stories, but The Blind Earthworm in the Labyrinth is an intriguing, and sometimes magical -- in action and language -- meandering tale. - M.A.Orthofer, 27 April 2020 - Return to top of the page - The Blind Earthworm in the Labyrinth:
- Return to top of the page - Thai author Veeraporn Nitiprapha (วีรพร นิติประภา) was born in 1962. - Return to top of the page -
© 2020-2021 the complete review
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