Ed Caesar

Not For Farangs

Sightseeing

By

Atlantic Books 224pp £10 order from our bookshop

Farang. It’s the Thai word for foreigner, tourist, outsider. Serious-minded travellers to Thailand hate it. They look for ways to break out of the stigma of being foreign. They want to find ‘the real Thailand’, not the tourist fantasy of overpriced soft drinks and smiling supplication. In Rattawut Lapcharoensap’s debut offering, breaking out of the brochured universe to tell seven stories about the world away from the tourist gaze, they may have been handed a key to the hidden garden. Being introduced to the Thailand of Sightseeing is like being invited to the locals’ party, instead of dancing all night at the Westerners’ disco. 

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • A treat from the LR Archive: exactly 20 years ago, Malcolm Bradbury reviewed John Updike's 'Bech at Bay' ,
    • ‘When bullets come close, the noise they make as they go past changes from a zing to a crack’ John Lanchester's dy… ,
    • Man with a Bloody Paintbrush: Robin Simon on Lucian Freud ,
    • Jane Ridley reviews The Diaries of Kenneth Rose (ed. D R Thorpe) ,
    • ‘Look,’ says Trump. ‘The fact is I’m only human.’ On the evidence of this book that point is debatable. From the A… ,
    • From our December/January issue - here's John Banville's review of Colm Tóibín on the fathers of Wilde, Yeats and J… ,
    • Hi , we would love to review 'Death of the Vazir-Mukhtar' in our next issue! Please could you get in… ,
    Follow Us