You don’t know his name, yet Veeraporn Nitiprapha is arguably one of today’s most important authors. His first novel, available in English under the title The Blind Earthworm in the Labyrinth [“Le ver de terre aveugle dans le labyrinthe”, inédit en français], caused a stir. The original Thai-language version sold 200,000 copies, in a country where reading habits (which are generally limited to the maxims of monks and advice on how to invest well in the stock market) were considered poor even before the arrival. mobile phone reading.
Kong Rithdee, the great writer and film critic who translates [en anglais] the work of Veeraporn Nitiprapha, says:
“No one knows why this novel has become so popular. Still, after the 2014 coup, he was expressing the emotions of many young people – a kind of romantic desperation born in the maze that is Thailand.”
Characters that have entered Thai culture
While he won [en 2015] the prestigious Southeast Asian Writers’ Prize, the region’s top literary prize, it took four years for a publisher, River Books, based in the Thai capital, to publish it in English. Critics praised the novel, but did not gloss over its complexity. They presented it as “fevered” et “dreamlike”, “magical and meandering”, as “a malarial hallucination […] who turns his readers into earthworms”.
With unfailing patience, the two sisters at the heart of the story, Chalika and Chareeya, entered Thai culture. Veeraporn’s work has been compared to everything from classic Thai epics to A hundred years of loneliness by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
Ample family frescoes
Memories of the Memories of the Black Rose Cat [“Souvenirs des souvenirs du chat rose et noir”], the second novel by Veeraporn Nitiprapha, is also a family saga. And it made her the first woman to win the Southeast Asian Writers’ Prize twice in a row. It has just been published in English, in May 2022.
This story rich in intrigue, of a claustrophobic intimacy, goes even further in its uncompromising poetics. It tells the story of a Chinese-Thai family in search of their identity, against a background of corruption, from Chinatown[thequarter[lequart