Siam : or The Woman Who Shot a Man [Bargain Price] [Paperback]

Lily Tuck (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 1, 2000

"A Joan Didionesque heroine . . . in Graham Greene's Far East . . . a telling portrait of a woman, a marriage, and a culture."--Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

Claire, the young bride of a government contractor, arrives in Bangkok with her husband on March 9, 1967, the day U.S. planes begin bombing runs on North Vietnam. At a dinner party, she meets and befriends Jim Thompson, the real-life American entrepreneur and founder of the Thai Silk Company. Weeks later, on Easter Sunday, Thompson vanishes without a trace in the Thai highlands. As the political implications of Thompson's disappearance surface, Claire becomes increasingly obsessed with his fate. Her quest into what happened, fueled by the longing and loneliness she feels in an exotic land marked by growing unrest, leads to a tragic truth that becomes a metaphor for two cultures in collision. Written in powerful, arresting prose, this taut suspense novel further establishes Lily Tuck as a major voice in literary fiction.

"Swift, sharp, and elegant . . . Reading Siam is like having your senses brushed by silk."--John Casey

2000 PEN/Faulkner Award Nominee

--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In Lily Tuck's Siam, the year is 1967 and 25-year-old Claire has come to Bangkok with her brand-new husband, a military advisor. When they first met, James had described Thailand as "not a bad place to live. Everyone's so friendly, everyone's always smiling. And you should see my house--hot and cold running servants, a pool, a garden..." But upon arrival in this exotic locale--which her guidebook, too, extols as the "Venice of the East"--Claire discovers dead dogs floating in the canals, green slime growing on the surface of the pool, and the natives polite but distant. The one person she feels an instant bond with is Jim Thompson, an American silk entrepreneur she encounters at a party. But immediately afterward, Thompson disappears during a trip to the Cameron Highlands, and Claire becomes obsessed with discovering what happened to him.

Siam is a work of fiction. Jim Thompson, however, was an actual person whose disappearance in Thailand has never been solved. Tuck uses this real-life mystery to illuminate her fictional characters' relationships and motivations. It's clear from the first chapter that Claire is a young woman without a solid sense of self. She is swept quite literally off her feet and into bed within hours of first meeting James, and a good deal of what happens to her from that point on seems to occur without her active participation or consent:

Several times a day Claire raised her skirt, dropped her pants. Her fingers, too, learned to unzip, to unbutton with the swiftness and skill of a lacemaker. It was not how Claire had imagined it, but there was hardly time for anything else.

Though she tries hard to be a "good guest" in Thailand, attempting to learn the language and history of her new home, she is never truly at ease among the people. Claire's fixation on the fate of a man she met only once grows in direct proportion to her feelings of loneliness and alienation. Meanwhile, America's escalating role in the Vietnam War parallels her increasing suspicion of everyone around her, even her husband--and soon the conditions are ripe for tragedy. Tuck weaves this intricate web of fact and fiction, reality and delusion, with an assured hand and prose that seems simpler than it actually is. She captures to perfection the disorientation of strangers in a strange land, the insularity of expatriate communities, and the gulf that yawns between privileged foreigners and the people they live among. Siam, then, is both a compelling drama and a profound meditation on the political and the personal. --Sheila Bright --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly

Probing the futility of good intentions and the pitfalls of cultural miscommunication, this assured and absorbing third novel by Tuck (The Woman Who Walked on Water) opens on March 9, 1967, the day the U.S. starts bombing North Vietnam from bases in Thailand. Claire, a 25-year-old Boston bride, arrives in Bangkok with her husband, James, an American engineer who builds runways in Nakhon Phanom, in northeast Thailand, for the American bombers. James's weekly trips to supervise construction leave his young, conspicuously blonde wife to fend for herself, and Claire discovers almost immediately that the luxurious lifestyle James described has an unpleasant underside. The heat is unrelenting; their pool is covered with green slime; the servants wash in a sewage-filled canal; hot peppers make most food indigestible to her. Unlike the few other American wives she meets, Claire is driven to question her surroundings, but the information she garners in hours of research at the local British library, through her daily language classes and on shopping excursions around the city is even more disturbing. Snubbed by Thai acquaintances when she tries to discuss the political situation, she turns to her husband, but insensitive James treats her as little more than a sexual object. Meanwhile, Claire becomes obsessed with legendary American entrepreneur Jim Thompson, who has disappeared while on a trip to the Highlands. Though she has met him only once, Thompson typifies to Claire all the mysterious events that seem to be going on just outside her circle of understanding. As the political and cultural climate in Bangkok grows increasingly oppressive, Claire begins to lose touch with reality, and her feverish imaginings precipitate tragedy. Tuck uses words with economy, evoking the lush locale and mysterious culture of Thailand with precise details and sensory images, and effectively contrasting the crisp, arrogant attitude of the American colony with the polite if evasive conduct of the Thai population. Her vivid, unromanticized picture of Bangkok in the late '60s is a fitting backdrop for a haunting story about the end of innocence. (Nov.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• ISBN-10: 0452282063
• ASIN: B000GG4HES
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.3 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 2.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,199,786 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Allusive, disturbing and incredible, November 29, 2001

By 

Janice M. Hansen (California United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Siam: or The Woman Who Shot a Man (Paperback)

This is a novel that obviously promoted strong pro and con sentiments. I found that many of the reasons that the readers were disturbed by the novel was what I liked best about it. This is certainly not a book for those that must have all their questions answered. This novel is a suggestion of Thai history, allusive, mysterious and provocative.

This is a story of a rather naive young American woman, Claire, who marries impulsively to a military contractor working out of Thailand during the Vietnam war. She must cope with a new culture, servants she distrusts and a husband that she becomes suspicious of. Yet, there is a tone of mystery, a friend they met at a dinner party disappears. Based on a real event, Jim Thompson, an American silk buisnessman disappears during a vacation. Claire becomes obsessed with his absence, along with other issues of her life that begin to unravel.

At first, her arrival prompted her to take Thai language lessons, research Thai history and culture in the local library and join a military wives weekly tour group. The plunge into Thai culture begins to take it's toll on Claire. She mistrusts the servants, and later finds items missing that she treasures. Worst, she doubts her debonair husband and fears he is having affairs with friend's wives. She takes to examining his dirty laundry for evidence of infidelity. She can't sleep and begins to drink more. She misses her home and her family. She finds the Thai food disgusting and the outside town filthy. There is a palpable tension that the author alludes to, a crisis in the making and a constant referral to the violence of the Thai past intersecting with this woman's life.

I guarantee all your questions will not be answered. The ending is allusive and disturbing. While accepting the novel as it is would be my advice, I would relish the opportunity to review this book in a book club setting. I am sure the interpretations would be various and vast. Don't let the originality put you off to an incredible unique novel.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I liked it!, March 15, 2000

By 

Maggie Rogers (Cincinnati, OH) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Siam: Or the Woman Who Shot a Man (Sewanee Writers' Series) (Hardcover)

Although somewhat hard to find, this book is well worth the effort- It's an engaging piece about life in the Sixties that doesn't revolve around the American "Free Love" Era. Instead, it focuses on the tremendous influence America had in Thailand and the pathetic ignorance of the Americans who were there to "help" during this time. As Claire takes us around the Thailand she knows, she gives us a little bit of history and a LOT of first hand observations, which allow us to form our own opinions and conclusions. This isn't a mystery or a travelogue, but, instead, is a facinating look at the personal reflections and interactions of a single person who is wise enough to open her eyes and take it all in. Let the reader/listener interpret it for themselves . . . and, just maybe, be a little sad to see Claire get on the plane bound for home, with so much still to see.

21 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Thai-resome, March 25, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Siam: Or the Woman Who Shot a Man (Sewanee Writers' Series) (Hardcover)

I think the author deserves credit for some originality, but the book is a bore, even with the Bangkok setting. (I lived there for 2 years recently, and I often wondered what the city was like during the Vietnam War. After reading this book, I still wondered, and felt like there was little more insight in "Siam" than what one could find in a guidebook) However, it was nice to read fiction about Bangkok that didn't dwell on the seedy, commercial-sex aspects of Bangkok, which a lot of other writers fixate on, as if that's all there is to Bangkok. And what a great counterpoint to recent fiction about bratty slackers slumming in Thailand...however...

My major problem with the book is that it relies too much on outside information and is not on its own merits a compelling read. Both the main character and the writer seem to be too self-consciously aping, then revising, the myth of Anna Leonowens. I'm personally tired of hearing all cultural references to Thailand, writerly or not, filtered through the veil of "The King and I"--and I was put off by the epigraph quoting a letter King Mongkut sent to Anna L. "The King and I" may be a cultural presence in the Western imagination that anyone writing about Thailand today must contend with, but that's partly because writers keep recycling/paying homage to the myth! I read William Warren's biography of Jim Thompson awhile back, after visiting the Jim Thompson house in Thailand. His life story is indeed captivating, but the author does little to bring him to life or to dramatize the parallels between the main character's life and Jim Thompson's, or to justify the main character's obsession with his fate. Thompson's simply not well-known enough to drop into the narrative and expect the general reader to be spellbound. And, lastly, the backdrop of the Vietnam war (and Bangkok's simultaneous, dubious rise as an R and R/sex tourism destination) is indeed fertile ground for writerly exploration--but the author expects the reader to fill in too many of the blanks. ("Oh, okay, Jim Thompson and Claire are as lost in Bangkok/Asia as the Americans were in Vietnam...") I almost feel like the writer expects the reader to be as conversant with "The King and I", Jim Thompson's biography, and Vietnam history as she is.

Other thoughts...I just didn't care about Claire or her husband James. I found the climax ludicrous and uninvolving. There is little comic relief in the book. Claire is self-absorbed and annoying, too much of a blank slate. Blank slates don't make for compelling reading. James is an archetypal, almost-ugly American dope. Claire and James are so unappealing, why should the reader care about their relationship? Claire's tracking of Jim Thompson reads like Nancy Drew. I think the book would've been stronger in the first-person limited voice, with Claire analyzing/deconstructing herself rather than the reader doing so with the limited background the author has provided. Check out "Gold by the Inch" by Lawrence Chua for a 90s take on Bangkok...if you could take the story of "Siam" and the psychological/cerebral take of "Gold by the Inch", I think you'd have quite a book!

I rushed out to buy "Siam" at a hardcover price, which I never do. It's a fast read and perhaps interesting to people who've lived/traveled in Thailand. But I wondered how much the book had been edited. It reads like too much has been pared down, stripped away, leaving us with the blueprints for a pretty good novel but not the execution of one. I simply don't understand why "Siam" has won such glowing reviews from some quarters--are the good reviews from people who've never travelled?