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Bangkok Days
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Product Description
Osborne’s is a visceral experience of Bangkok, whether he’s wandering the canals that fill the old city; dining at the No Hands Restaurant, where his waitress feeds him like a baby; or launching his own notably unsuccessful career as a gigolo. A guide without inhibitions, Osborne takes us to a feverish place where a strange blend of ancient Buddhist practice and new sexual mores has created a version of modernity only superficially indebted to the West. Bangkok Days is a love letter to the city that revived Osborne’s faith in adventure and the world.
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #16539 in Books
- Published on: 2009-05-26
- Released on: 2009-05-26
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Binding: Hardcover
- 288 pages
Features
- ISBN13: 9780865477322
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Bangkok is the sponge that absorbs those who have lapsed into dilettantism, writes Osborne (The Accidental Connoisseur) in recounting his time in the fabled city of recreational sex and Buddhism. As he encounters characters questing for sensation and knowledge, he muses on how easy it is for Westerners to remake themselves in the East—much as the 19th-century English schoolteacher Anna Leonowens did when she tutored the royal children of Siam and fashioned herself into a mythologized literary figure. As he discovers in an encounter with a Catholic missionary, it is the ideal place to lose the burdensome grip of the self. In Osborne's narrative, Bangkok serves as an existential crossroads for a cast of British, Australian and Spanish expatriates who are haphazardly searching for and running away from responsibilities; in the labyrinthine city, these tourists have established a playground for adult pleasure. As their documentarian, Osborne is at once incisive and romantic. He creates a character-driven travelogue that reveals but does not exploit the salacious subtext of Bangkok nightlife. It is a journey flush with atmosphere but tempered with a subtext of lonely Western wonder. (June)
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Review
"Bangkok is the sponge that absorbs 'those who have lapsed into dilettantism,' writes Osborne (The Accidental Connoisseur) in recounting his time in the fabled city of recreational sex and Buddhism. As he encounters characters questing for sensation and knowledge, he muses on how easy it is for Westerners to remake themselves in the East-much as the 19th-century English schoolteacher Anna Leonowens did when she tutored the royal children of Siam and fashioned herself into a mythologized literary figure. As he discovers in an encounter with a Catholic missionary, it is the ideal place to lose the burdensome grip of the "self." In Osborne's narrative, Bangkok serves as an existential crossroads for a cast of British, Australian and Spanish expatriates who are haphazardly searching for and running away from responsibilities; in the labyrinthine city, these tourists have established a playground for adult pleasure. As their documentarian, Osborne is at once incisive and romantic. He creates a character-driven travelogue that reveals but does not exploit the salacious subtext of Bangkok nightlife. It is a journey flush with atmosphere but tempered with a subtext of lonely Western wonder."—Publishers Weekly
"This book should rightly have been called 'Bangkok Nights,' for Osborne (The Naked Tourist) provides a raunchy account of the nightlife and bars and bargirls of Thailand's capital. In particular, he delves into the lives of a motley band of aging, libertine Westerners (Farangs) living in his apartment complex and explores the city in their company. Their tragicomic lives are compelling, and Osborne provides some extraordinary anecdotes. For instance, when an illness takes the author to the Bumrungad Hospital, he finds that it is more like a five-star hotel than a hospital. Despite being confined, the author and a companion manage a visit to a girly bar with two IV drips in tow. What lifts this book beyond mere sleaziness is Osborne's prose. He uses language with great skill, and the sounds and smells of Bangkok are wonderfully evoked. Osborne's writing conveys a genuine love for the city and an appreciation of its ethos of easygoing tolerance. Recommended." —Library Journal
"In Bangkok Days: A Sojourn in the Capital of Pleasure, Osborne revels in the intersection of the sacred and the profane . . . Bangkok Days is a refreshing diversion from the common portrait of the city's licentious reputation. From the Muslim neighborhood surrounding the Haroon Mosque to the ancient Buddhist Loha Prasat temple, Osborne finds beauty in all corners of the city. Meanwhile, his cultural exploration is sprinkled with information about the city's historic past. Osborne is at once sincere with his audience but occasionally deceitful with those he interacts with in the book. It's a commanding combination, one that lures readers to follow him around every twist and turn of Bangkok's back alleys." —Forbes.com
About the Author
LAWRENCE OSBORNE has written for The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, and other publications, and is the author of five previous books. Born in England, he lives in New York.
Customer Reviews
Wonderful
I visited Bangkok for the first time only weeks before reading this book, and really enjoyed following the adventures of Lawrence Osbourne in a small underworld community of foreign transplants to Bangkok. It's a travelogue, and nothing too momentous happens, but the sights, sounds, impressions, are beautifully narrated. I particularly enjoyed the naked honesty and self-irony Osbourne employs in describing some truly awkward moments. I laughed out loud many times, but also felt sad, engaged, and provoked at different times throughout this thoughtful story.
Intersections
Part personal journal and part travel writing, "Bangkok Days" is a street-eyed, alley-eyed, canal-eyed, sidewalk-eyed take on a brutal city where mystery and honesty, myth and reality, fable and truth all collide. It's been twenty years since my lone visit to Bangkok, but Osborne's writing brought it all back. I was a mere tourist, Osborne is a writer who knows how to stay with a subject and dig deep. The feeling of reading "Bangkok Days" is to see Bangkok inside-out. There is romance-free. The tales are drowned (occasionally) in booze as Osborne and his assortment of colorful companions explore various parts of the city or re-explore familiar ones. You will gain a keen insight into the recent protests, glean some brief spiritual Thai history and have a few myths exploded, most notably a wonderful section that deconstructs everything about the "King and I" and Yul Brynner. "Bangkok Days" is an explanation of the city precisely because it sets out not to be an explanation of the city. The book is essentially a series of broad brush strokes with occasional flashes of poetry. It's as much about Osborne as it is about Bangkok, so don't be fooled going in. "The restaurant was on the second floor, an Ayurvedic buffet with cumin-sprinkled boiled eggs thrown in to appease the frustrated carnivores. The idea behind the spa was to control one's intake of calories to a bare minimum determined on the day of one's arrival by the in-house nutritionist. Fortunately, the guy had fled to Bangkok and the buffet therefore seemed morally aimless. The waiters lit a candle for us; the windows rattled and whined. Lionel and McGinnis, against all odds, had dressed in jackets and ties, paradoxically appropriate in this spare, high-minded décor, and we broke open a bottle of Evian while speaking in whispers, as one often does in a totally empty space." The sub-title of "Bangkok Days" is "A Sojourn in the Capital of Pleasure" and Osborne fully captures the attitude shift that allows the skin commerce to flourish. But in the end "Bangkok Days" is a mood put to words, an attempt to capture the deep and unusual vibe of that city--its food, colors, smells, humanity, religion, challenges and delights.
A Travel Book that Brings it All Home
Osborne's book presents a deft dance between Anglo cultural paralysis and the steamy, messy promise of the East. He manages to avoid romanticizing Bangkok by showing us the ways that the city affirms rather than annuls the loneliness of the western male ghosts who mostly populate his canvas. And the sexual and gustatory promiscuities that prop up the heat-wilted balloon of Bangkok life are ecstatic only in the moment. Yet, for this very reason, the tenor of solitude takes on a strangely Buddhist cast. These characters might be damned, but they're damned in part for how completely they've melted into the here and now. Osborne shows us that the underbelly of Nirvana may not be all that different from the topbelly. With the depth of this meditation, there's a great deal of humor here as well--rich language and observation of the physical fabric of a major city. All of it brings home to the reader the endlessly mysterious exoticisms and simply seedy ins and outs of his or her own fleshly being.
