Sightseeing is a collection of seven short stories that touch on issues like family tension, generational division, and cultural differences. These stories all felt very raw. They all focused on one particular moment of life—an encounter with an foreign tourist, a trip abroad with a parent, a man's experience with the draft, an encounter with a refugee neighbor—but none of these moments, these stories, felt particularly optimistic. The voices in the stories all felt...not defeated, exactly, but perhaps disenchanted. It may have something to do with the perspective of the stories' narrators. Several of the stories were written in the past tense, as if the narrator was reflecting on this past incident or moment. Maybe this is why the voices sound so detached; maybe these are memories the narrators would rather not remember.
It's also worth noting that all of Lapcharoensap's narrators—except the narrator of the final story, "The Cockfighter"—were male, and I wondered why this was. Did culture play a role in that decision or was it purely the whim of the author? Though these stories, as I mentioned, weren't very happy, I found myself sympathetic with all of their narrators. I couldn't quite figure this author out after reading a couple of the stories. Sometimes, when you start a short story collection, you quickly pick up on the author's style and realize that all the stories have similar endings—a happy ending, a bittersweet ending, an unhappy ending. For example, when I read Simon Van Booy's The Secret Lives of People in Love, I quickly learned that all his stories end with some little catch, some little amount of pain that keeps the ending from being completely "happy." Well, Lapcharoensap isn't that easy to categorize. Some stories ended bittersweet, some happy, some poignant, and some just ended without much conclusion. Overall, these stories served more as introductions to characters than conclusions. The endings were mostly open-ended, which makes these characters memorable as you wonder what happened to them.
A good selection for the World Reading Challenge, and a good collection of short stories for readers interested in exploring unfamiliar (or at least, different) cultures.
Only one month left in this year-long World Reading Challenge, and I have to pat myself on the back here for successfully keeping up with it! September's country is India, and I haven't chosen a book yet. Any suggestions?
