The English translation of the Thai novel The Brotherhood of Kaeng Khoi by Uthis Haemamool has been published and is available on naiin.com. The novel was translated by Bangkok-based US writer Peter Montalbano. Beware that, although this is primarily a Thai-language website, the book’s page shows up with the buttons in English, even if the synopsis is in Thai.
Here’s the blurb in English which appears on the back cover:
“Deep, secret, and terrible feelings seized my soul . . . I was lost in the Himmaphan forest, secretly watching two demigods, invisible to the human world, as they fell into the rhythms of their own dance.
What is truth? How much of what we see is illusion, how much reality? Hard to figure for anyone, especially a bereaved, uprooted adolescent. Yet something cries out for resolution here.
Young Lap Lae is unhappy with just about everyone and everything, and the world seems to feel the same way towards him. He gets one view from the father who dominates his life, and quite another from his mother, who communes with the Thai spirit world of ghosts and demons.
Lap Lae and Kaeng Khoi are high-strung and headstrong brothers from a dysfunctional household in a small Thai town in the late twentieth century. In The Brotherhood of Kaeng Khoi, after tracing their family origins we share their struggles as they grow towards adulthood: in a mountain monastery . . . in a treehouse in the woods . . . with the girls next door. Can they negotiate the traps, calamities, and misadventures to emerge with integrity and a clear sense of who they are, and how to move forward with their lives?”
The book sells for 535 baht (about $17) and has 450 pages with notes and glossary. Uthis Haemamool won the SEA Write Award in 2009 for his novel Lap Lae – Kaeng Khoi (The Brotherhood of Kaeng Khoi), and has also been shortlisted for this year’s SEA Award too with Lak A-lai (The Nature of Regret).
