The “parts” in the title of Prabda Yoon’s latest short story collection to be translated into English, Moving Parts, are body parts: hair, a finger, a belly, a butt, a hand, a pair of feet, a (missing) penis, a (missing) pair of eyes, a heart, a tongue, and a tail. Each of these gets a story, or “part”—as in, the title of the first story is “Part 1: Yucking Finger”, the title of the third story is “Part 3: Destiny’s a Dick”, and so on. The only other book I read this year where each chapter is dedicated to a different body part is Maggie O’Farrell’s I Am, I Am, I Am, her memoir about all the times she almost died: in her book, the chapter titles correspond to the body part(s) whose malfunctioning or risk of injury almost caused O’Farrell’s death, followed by the year when said malfunctioning or risk of injury took place—as in, “Neck (1990)”, or “Spine, Legs, Pelvis, Abdomen, Head (1977)”.
However, while O’Farrell’s approach to the human body emphasises its frailty and could be described as moving and life-affirming, Moving Parts belongs to that category of body-books that focus on the more horrific and/or gross and/or ridiculous aspects of being trapped in a bag of meat and bones—a category of books that I’v reviewed frequently on this blog, from Naomi Booth’s Sealed, about the horror of growing a living being inside you during pregnancy, to Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay’s Panty (tr. Arunava Sinha), which explores that strange intersection between sexiness and grossness, to Han Kang’s Human Acts (tr. Deborah Smith), in which brutal acts of violence demonstrate the frightening ease with which the human body can be reduced to its basic component parts. Moving Parts is lighter and more surreal than these books, but it still deals with the way the body can betray and bewilder: in “Part 1: Yucking Finger”, a man’s index finger calls out “yuck!” whenever it disapproves of something its owner does or says; in “Part 5: Mock Tail”, which is set in a world where most people have tails, a tail-less girl is nervous about confessing her lack to the boy she loves; in “Part 6: New Hand”, a schoolgirl (bloodlessly, painlessly) removes her own hand and gives it to a boy to look after as a test to see if he could be boyfriend material. All this may be a bit too weird for some readers, but I found the best stories in the collection to be delightfully playful and funny, stacked with puns and wordplay, often ending in disarmingly silly punchlines, and rich in odd little moments that you’ll want to stop and read aloud to your other half or cat or whoever else is in the vicinity.
As with most collections, some of the stories here didn’t 100% work for me, but even these stories had something that made them a little special or memorable—a strange twist a few lines before the end, an unusual structure, a bizarre minor character. The only story that left me completely cold was “Part 8: A Hairy Situation”, where Yoon never quite manages to subvert the ickiness of the premise—a young, sexy teacher being seduced by one of his students. I should also say that readers looking for psychologically complex characters and/or detailed descriptions of real life will be disappointed: as Yoon himself admits/explains in an interview with Wildness,
… the fact that I see writing as an artistic practice interchangeable with design or painting or sculpture or film or music also informs the way I lay the foundation of my storytelling, particularly how I tend to focus largely on ideas and attitudes rather than character development and the other features that are supposed to be of high literary value. I get bored quickly with common dramatic themes and characters that resemble real life and real people. Of course, when I create my characters and situations I want them to feel real and engaging, but I’m not interested in spending time and words describing scenes in detail or show the particulars of my characters or build a complete literary human being or something like that. Big literary works that feel like meticulously constructed worlds are certainly impressive, and they’re definitely works of art, but I have neither the talent nor the interest to compose such a work. I’m more inspired by ideas and moments.
It’s interesting actually—I remember finding Yoon’s un-literary, almost punk/anarchic style frustrating when I read his first collection to be published in English, The Sad Part Was (which, sadly, I did not like), but, for some reason, it really worked for me this time round. I’m not sure what changed—maybe Yoon learned a few tricks in the intervening two years between the publication of the two books in the original Thai (The Sad Part Was was first published in Thai in 2000, Moving Parts in 2002), or maybe the thematic unity makes this book feel like there’s more of a concept behind it, giving the more demanding part of my brain something to chew on while the rest of my brain enjoyed the ride.
Few things are more challenging than translating humour. For example, a text may be stuffed with puns, but puns can almost never be translated literally, so the translator faces the difficult decision of either losing the pun, or transferring the “punnyness” to somewhere else in the text, or replacing the pun with a different form of wordplay, such as rhyming or alliteration. Or, a story might end with a punchline, in which case the translator must take particular care with sentence rhythm in order to preserve the ensure punchline’s correct delivery. Or, a story’s humour may derive from the contrast between the way different characters express themselves (e.g. slang vs. “proper” English, poetic vs. down-to-earth), in which case the translator must be able to switch easily from one linguistic register to the next, and draw a clear distinction between the registers. Or, the humour might derive from strange imagery, which means that the translator must describe the imagery clearly enough that the reader can visualise it without much effort; the risk here is to over- or under-explain. I’m happy to say that, throughout Moving Parts, Mui Poopoksakul nails all four of these types of humour, and probably a few more types that I’m forgetting at the moment. In particular, the over-elegant lines she gave a porn-watching “bro” type in “Part 5: Mock Tail” made a potentially annoying character into a scene-stealer, and the last line of “Part 6: New Hand” made me snort with laughter.