If you’re fortunate enough to find one of John M. Cadet’s old books in a used bookstore, you’re in for a treat. His fiction, mostly centered in Thailand, is clearly about another time, although not necessarily a less innocent one. Occidental Adam, Oriental Eve (1981) is, like Venusberg Revisited (which WoWasis reviewed a while back), a collection of short stories, published by Cadet’s Charles Browne Publications.  This book consists of ten short stories, displaying Cadet’s taste for irony, humor, and insight.

There’s a lot to like in the book.  ‘Traveller’s Tale,’ for instance, is a wonderful take on the thought process of someone who can’t tell a simple story of a travel experience, and instead must run on. And on. And on (everyone has met one, and we live in constant dread that occasionally we might cross that line as well).  Cadet, who wrote for Bangkok World and taught literature, is best when exploring the psychology of his characters, whether they’re stealing black lace panties, stiffing a buddy on travel expenses, or in the act of dying of a shark attack. Of the latter situation, as skillfully described in ‘Mr. Pandu’s Quarter Hour,’ Cadet sets the mentality of the fated protagonist early on:

He was the central and controlling force in the office, no doubt about that.  His eyes — those round buttons that always seemed to slide downwards, sideways under pressure — never failed to take in the significant detail around him: the state of the messenger’s shoes,  the length of a teller’s hair, another badge in Mr. Sombat’s lapel. Because these were facts, details, details, items of information he could accumulate and use, whereas friendship, confidences, any attempts at human contact were things he had no time for and was quick to discourage.  Let anyone come to him expecting to be helped and Mr. Pandu would lower his eyes, swivel them from side to side, smile most amiably and allow the moment to bleed itself of living significance.

It seems that Cadet wrote only three books, these two collections of short stories and The Ramakien, his discussion of the Ramayana classic mythological tale. We would love to encounter more, if there are any, and will continue hitting those used bookstore in hope that one day something else will turn up. His short stories are a treat, located in a Thailand that in some ways has changed significantly in the thirty years since they were written, and in other ways, somehow not so much at all.