Collin Piprell
The sardonic Collin Piprell has captured nuances of Thai and expat society in a marvelously tongue-in-cheek style that is, at its best, replete with some of the finest ribald observances in the genre.
Piprell's Bangkok Knights (1989, ISBN 974-8303-45-4) is a well-written tale of the denizens of a Bangkok bar.
Yawn: A Thriller (2000, ISBN 974-8303-43-8) features several characters that appeared in Knights, and is set in the islands, with a theme related to scuba, treasure hunting, and New Age mysticism gone wrong.
Some of Piprell’s best writing can be found in Kicking Dogs (1991, ISBN 974-8303-44-6), where he rails against Bangkok traffic, the Thai predilection for constant noise, and the extended Thai family that comes to roost at the home of virtually every Western man sporting a Thai girlfriend:
“Bia grew her bangs down so you couldn’t see her eyes.
And no matter what she said, she couldn’t see a thing with her hair that way, with the consequence she was always tripping over things or falling down the stairs.
She thought she had little eyes, which as any Thai lady will tell you aren’t suay, they aren’t beautiful, so she grew her hair down over them and saved her money for an operation.
I told Mu her sister would never live to get round eyes, at the rate she was going, and there was nothing wrong with her eyes anyway, except of course they were covered with hair.
If she had any money she should get an operation on her brain, which might in fact be defective.
But Mu told me I didn’t understand Thai girls. Which was not news to me.”
We would welcome another book from this Canadian expat, whose non-fiction magazine articles can occasionally be seen in publications such as Fah Thai, the Bangkok Airways inflight magazine.
Visit Collin Piprell on the web at www.collinpiprell.com
Collin, who has also written under the pseudonym Ham Fiske, has written a number of other books including:
- Bangkok Old Hand (1993, ISBN 974-202-008-6, a collection of non-fiction essays)
- Diving in Thailand (1993)
- National Parks of Thailand (1991)
- Thailand’s Coral Reefs (1993)
- Thailand: The Kingdom Beneath the Sea (1991)