The Liberators is a powerful punch of a novel packed into a mere 240 pages. With an economy of words, almost bordering on stinginess, Koh delivers full fleshed characters and a tragedy of relationships and history. This is a masterful work of historical fiction.
The novel revolves around two intertwined narratives, one historical and the other intimate. The division between North and South Korea is the constant thread of grief and loss that plays against a more personal tragedy in the form of a young couple’s romance, marriage, and slow death thereof as the husband and wife are separated through migration and tradition. Nation here becomes an actor itself; the North and the South, like siblings or lovers torn apart by foreign forces, growing in ever divergent directions. This parting is mimicked by the husband and wife, until at last reconciliation seems impossible.
Here is a complex interweaving of expectations and desires that become thwarted by forces of history and culture in ways that are beyond any individual’s control.
This novel gut-punched me in ways that only good novels can. I could feel tears sting along those nerves behind my eyes. Sometimes I felt my skin get sweat-clammy. The Unsettled unsettles, just like Mathis wants it to.
Right from the start, The Unsettled knocks you down and it doesn’t let up. Its breathless, relentless struggle, the way it forces the reader to keep grasping for relief mimics the feeling that its protagonists feel, trapped in a transient limbo of poverty and abuse and disappointment. This is a novel about what it is to be black and working class in urban America.
The novel revolves around a young boy and his mother, forced to live in temporary housing because of an abusive stepfather and husband, because of racist, classist inequities, because life has dealt them a harsh hand. The novel documents their life before and during their stay in this housing, the people they encounter there, at school, in their former and current neighborhoods. Interwoven between these grim chapters is the story of the mother’s past, her mother and a different world of an all-black enclave in the deep south. In this place too, there is the struggle for blackness to simply exist. The two stories are linked by several threads, the most salient of which is the structural oppression of blackness in America; both stories eventually merge into one, culminating in an explosive end.
Mathis writes with a machete, its edge as sharp as a scalpel. The prose in The Unsettled is blunt, straightforward, and will absolutely cut you down. But the pace of this beating does not exhaust; I was compelled to return to the book again and again until it was done with me (and not I done with it). Its characters were there with me, around me, so fleshy and tangible. I read mostly in bed, where I feel warm and safe, and there were more than a few times when I put down the book and nearly cried, wishing they did not have to live in such an unsafe, cold, grey place.
It is so rare to find novels and creative fiction that is not only set in Southeast Asia, but written by Southeast Asian authors (rare, not impossible!) that when I saw this coming out in 2023 I JUMPED on it! And I am so glad I did. This is a book that makes my heart sing!
Nardone’s Welcome Me to the Kingdom is a novel woven in stories, revolving around the lives of Thais who live in Thailand or beyond in the diaspora, transnational and transcultural Thais. This is a book about people, individuals as they navigate the multiethnic and multicultural world of Thailand, and what it means to be Thai for them. The characters, as diverse as they are in terms of ethnicity, class, and gender, are connected together in this novel; they and their lives serve as a microcosmic diorama of Thai realities where muslims of the south grapple with discrimination, poverty stricken girls from the village migrate to the city, mixed race Thai/White kids straddle two worlds and belong not quite fully into either one.
The stories span across several decades and generations, allowing the reader a view, not only into modern Thainess, but also how the concept has changed over time and the ways in which being Thai is differently defined for individuals of different religions, classes, genders, etc. Language is a significant element in these stories, not surprisingly since Thailand (like so many other parts of Southeast Asia) has and remains affected by colonialism and its invasive culture (though it was never politically colonized). Welcome Me to the Kingdom is about the rubbing together of cultures, the tension and chafing as multiple perspectives collide. This is a historical novel offering readers a textured, multi-faceted sense of contemporary Thailand, a place in which tradition and modernity coexist, sometimes contentiously, sometimes not.
My favorite characters were Nam and Lara, their story, interwoven with Pea’s and Rick’s, was my favorite, though I probably identified most with Ping. I think readers will find a little bit of themselves in these pages, whether they are Thai or not, as the emotion driving these stories is universal. Nardome’s stories are about desire, ambition, longing, and fear — that inevitable friction between parents and children, within families, the old(er) and new(er) attempting to find common ground.
For readers who enjoy anthropology, history, and postcolonial literature, Welcome Me to the Kingdom will be an especially enjoyable read.
Dr JoAnn LoSavio 