TurkFist's World..part 3

Erudition falters. Stranger is that: “Despite the fact that she was a destructive force this was the woman that men wanted most; not the passive porcelain oriental beauties that some feminists think men seek ” (Email from the author)

The stories in which Nam appear are, apart from desultory references on Thailandstories.com, confined to Thai 360.com and unfinished. At times carelessly written, badly constructed even incoherent with a Dostoevskian untidiness, they are however mercilessly successful, keel hauling us through the viscous liquid of the collective unconscious to create an anti-heroine for the insanity of our times

An approximate chronology. Notwithstanding horrific anecdotes about her past Turk becomes fascinated by Nam, who is pure evil. Men beat him up expertly, possibly at her instigation then she succours him in hospital. She leads him to a house somewhere outside Bangkok, scene to a fauna of violences redolent of the “Story of O”. Another night after a typically chaotic, emotionally sadistic bar evening she turns up at his door primed for cohabitation but then goes out to tryst a customer almost immediately. Interweaved is a climactically ferocious subplot about a Polish whore, Yenetchka, who knows Nam. Turkfist the author plays a lesbian card; two women, abusing a customer. A conspicuous lacuna is that Turk and Nam never fuck.

For those who know Thailand the myth making succeeds perhaps partly for banal reasons. Most of us have met a woman at least part Nam, with whom oblivion was sweet and dangerous of a night, and more generally each beer moment on the Cowboy can be your last. In other terms; every old Asia hand is in thrall to an illiberal antibourgeois neo-colonial life nexus (soon to be lugubriously described by an up and coming Lacanian anthropologist!).

But as literature it is much more interesting. While not uniformly so, these stories tend to evoke Bangkok less atmospherically than elsewhere in the Turkfist corpus. Explicitly from the moment the boatman ferries them along "The Klong to Nowhere" (http://www.thai360.com/fbb/showtopic.php?tid/259962/) arriving at a house "like some dilapidated colonial mansion all peeling paintwork and broken shutters", until the end of that story, we are in the gothic exotic historical mind space of a European court with natives, in the Orient. This occidental pedigree is taken further in “Lesbo Action in the Mist” (http://www.thai360.com/fbb/showtopic.php?tid/303936/post/303936/hl// when Yenetchka describes her youth in Poland.

Nam herself, whose mother had been killed on the whim of a customer, is a force of nature rather than a doll who could be fucked and forgot. (selective paraphrase of an email from the author)   Through her, Turk finds a way to parry his cloying passivity by becoming still less of an entity, and she makes all his other women appear pallid prototypes or simple cul de sacs. Her use for him vindicates his self-loathing and fulfils his wounds. There is safety too in her preponderant strength and evil, meaning he will never have to love her, nor ever be troubled by her pathos or showing weakness and so presenting him with a disastrous reflection of his own clay. As the nurturing form of the meaningless perversity of life ultimately she is Thanatos, who will satisfy both his superficial urge to transgress and deepest yearning to return to inorganism

There is some very fine writing too. In the early part of “When Worlds Collide”(http://www.thai360.com/fbb/showtopic.php?tid/268031/post/268031/hl//) Turk’s description of the Bangkok sky would make Freud smile with sly satisfaction. The clunkiness of the end of this dream motif “When I woke up I knew I had to see Nam." is so inexorably right. What follows are eight hundred words of superb description of Turk’s journey from his Condo to Soi cowboy, with peerless nuggets such as:

"Pay wat farang? The farang temple. In other words the bar. Most of the kids here were the kids of prostitutes. They all had the nature of the farang male, and most Thai males come to think of it, down pat. We worshipped at the bar. The bar was our religion. The bar got a tithe of all we earned."

Nam does not exhaust the darkness. “The Groin Tingling Allure of Evil Women.” (http://www.thailandstories.com/article/mature/the-groin-tingling-allure-of-evil-women.html) finishes with rare semiotic caprice, Turkfist writing as a post modern authorial deity. After recounting a routine butchery two people talk:

“And actually, come to think of it, I can think of at least one girl who might quite happily torture you to death. That crazy girl you used to know. What really happened between you two?”

“Come on. I know you read it all.”

“Yeah. But that was while it was all still going on. What really happened?

“Really? I don’t know. I only know half the story. When I find out the other half I’ll write it all down. Maybe I’ll publish in some big fat novel using fake names.”

“Like Turk Fist?”

“What are you talking about? Turk Fist is my real name.”

“Yeah… And my name is Frank.”

“It is now.”

Rollicking good yarns

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