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4.0 out of 5 stars
The Mango Tree Cafe', September 29, 2011
This review is from: The Mango Tree Cafe', Loi Kroh Road (Paperback)
Having lived in Chiang Mai during the time that The Cafe' in question was operating, I could see the references to many of the people in the novel. It is an incestuous little place with the expat community of various sexual deviance's or preferences grouping together in their little individual communities casting aspersions upon the other groups in an attempt to cover their own nefarious actions. A little Peyton Place it is. Well written to make it easy to read. I would recommend and wish Mr. Solomon the best for his forth coming memoirs they may be very interesting. Humorist Will Rogers put it a little more pithily: "Memoirs means when you put down the good things you ought to have done and leave out the bad ones you did do."
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Tasty Mango Tree Cafe, February 13, 2008
This review is from: The Mango Tree Cafe', Loi Kroh Road (Paperback)
Alan Solomon and Taryn Simpson, in The Mango Tree Café Loi Kroh Road, present the life of Larry. We both meet and say goodbye to Larry as an old man sitting in his cane chair on the veranda of his Chiangmai home peering into the past and future. What's in-between is an entertaining and sensitive story of a man's awakening to find and serve the truth.
Larry, a teenager, heeds the words of his father to leave the small New Zealand village so that his achievement will be greater than ". . . watching the grass grow and releasing the pressure from the udders of cows. . ." His travels take him to Thailand, "Land of a Thousand Smiles" and to the fertile beauty of the Mae Rim region where the solitude of the jungle stands in sharp contrast to the noise and bustle of Chiangmai's Loi Kroh Road. On this famous and hypnotic road, the powerful and the powerless come to wash bad luck away in drink, prostitution, and anonymity.
In one of its bars, Larry has a vision (not his first) that points him to partake of the road and feed it a different food, to experience a different kind of love, and to acknowledge and embrace his purposefulness.
I'm convinced that roads like this and their seedy, gritty dynamic exist around the world. What I especially liked about The Mango Tree Café Loi Kroh Road is that it places us in the pocket of Larry's shirt closest to his heart. We are standing with him in the press of his life, peering into and out of the café, seeing it for what it is, meeting its characters, smelling its smells, tasting its strange humor and barely disguised grief.
We move back and forth through time and reality to the accident scene, and eventually come to rest as the realization of who he is and why he is here presents itself. Through Larry we are reminded of how little we are really known and understood by others--and often ourselves--and how his seeking is hardly different from our own if we will but stare into its face. Enjoy The Mango Tree Café Loi Kroh Road.
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1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Wild and Wonderful, October 19, 2007
This review is from: The Mango Tree Cafe', Loi Kroh Road (Paperback)
I read this book in order to interview the authors and I am soooo glad I did. It is a fascinating read about a place I never knew existed...Loi Kroh Rd in the city of Chiang Mai in the country of Thailand... and it's inhabitants, including Larry. This is his story.
Larry was raised on a farm with a strict father and feels the need to run from being trapped on the farm. He believed he had a mission in life and is guided by a ghostly figure which appeared to him when he was a child. On his adventures, he sees loneliness in all the people around him. He falls out of love losing the only real love he ever had and, in reality, it is his own mortality and his own loneliness which he fears.
An excerpt:
"As Larry stood on that lonely road, his eyes drawn away to the distance, he soaked up the beautiful smoky-grey hills, rich with jungle growth, where fields of color raced up to the thick base of the trees to bow in reverence. Where the most prominent and interesting objects to interrupt the flatness were the old village houses and the odd buffalo lazily mingling with fields of rice stalks, soybeans and wild flowers. Never mind the stream of heat that rested heavily upon every living thing. The lush of the jungle craved the perspiration of humidity's breath."
As you can tell by the above paragraph, this book puts one directly in the feeling of the moment.
What's unusual about this book is that it was a collaboration by two authors who've never met and who've never even spoken by phone ~ one being in China and the other in America.
Once I started this book it was tough to put it down. Once down, I kept coming back to it. Expect to see The "Mango Tree Cafe, Loi Kroh Rd." as a movie in the not-too-distant future.
Revvell
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