Wanlaya’s love, Seinee Saowaphong, 1952
Paris after the Second World War: the Left Bank, Montmartre, and Picasso’s dove. Wanlaya is a Thai music student with challenging ideas and challenged friends – Tueanta, the model wife who divorces her careerist diplomat of a husband; René, the surrealistic painter who shuns life; Yong, the drifting sailor who goes back to his roots; Seinee and François, the journalists; Jeannette; and many others – all engaged in their own ways in a search for the true values of life, from the Jardin du Luxembourg to the Thai paddy field, via the lessons of French and Spanish history, via Marseille, the Asturias, Davos and Deauville. The meaning of art, the birth of music, the evil of elitist education, the value of work, women’s liberation: this swinging, iconoclastic novel of ideas, published in the early 1950s but only read twenty years later, has inspired Thai progressive circles ever since, and remains a hymn to life clamouring for change and ringing with the hopes and generosity of youth.