Graphic novels are taken more seriously in Europe than in the English-speaking world, and so it is perhaps not surprising that The King of Bangkok, a socio-political-historical narrative based on ten years of ethnographic research by anthropologist Claudio Sopranzetti, first appeared in Italian. Although a “novel” in the sense it’s fictionalized, the elements (say the authors) are based on real people and real events: the result is a sort of distillation of recent Thai social history.
Nok is a blind lottery-ticket seller. He lost his eyesight during the “red shirt” demonstrations. He and his wife are leaving Bangkok, a presence which looms, sometimes exciting, but often baleful and malevolent over their lives.
The story starts in 1982, when Nok comes to the city to find his fortune; he slowly works his way, and on a visit home, gets married. In the mid 90s, Nok is working in construction on an island; he takes up drugs to help him through the hard work. The financial crisis puts paid to his job, but not his addiction. His wife Gai rescues him.
Politics parallels the story and follows Nok. Nok re-establishes himself as a motorcycle taxi driver and becomes tied up in politics in the Taksin era. This turns out badly … he loses his eyesight and his faith in the cause, or at least its leader, when in 2012 Taksin an end to the street mobilizations.

This somewhat dry outline belies a story that is often affecting and human; the book’s politics are worn relatively lightly. But as in most graphic novels, the artwork is at least as important as text. Sara Fabbri’s colored line drawings give the tale an urgency that words themselves cannot convey. The book credits three authors: Sopranzetti, the artist Fabbri and Chiara Natalucci who was from the publishing industry.
Although a graphic novel may not seem the obvious choice for a semi-academic treatment, but King of Bangkok is not the first: Jenny White’s Turkish Kaleidoscope took much the same path, and apparently for similar reasons. Does this hybrid treatment work? It is certainly more accessible than a scholarly treatise, and a graphic novel requires a different skill set than does prose.
The authors say they “wanted to present to an international audience another face of Thailand, one a bit more complex than a tourist brochure,” but those without any knowledge of Thailand and its recent history may however have some difficulty engaging with story: there is a timeline at the end, which places Nok’s story in context with the political developments, but this is more an aide-memoire to those who had read about these events at the time but whose chronology has become hazy with the passage of time. The artwork seems more authentic—more Thai in some ineffable way—than the language, which is of course in English and the resulting distance from Thai can’t really be helped.
It can be hard for non-Thais to know whether—the authors’ protestations that they were fastidious in their research notwithstanding—a book such as this has accurately caught the people, places and times. Perhaps the best commendation for the book is that the Thai edition, which came out in 2019 (not long, indeed, after the Italian version), was a bestseller and won a “Notable Book Award” in 2020. It seems to have a struck a chord with those in the best position to know.
Peter Gordon is editor of the Asian Review of Books.
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