Harry Nicolaides' Weekly Column

Exclusively for Phuket-Info.com

VERISIMILITUDE - Back cover

ver-i-si-mil-i-tude: appearance of truth; the quality of seeming to be true or real

“A dead butterfly. Fallen Frangipani flowers. Counterfeit artworks. They all look vibrant, alive and enigmatic. And they all make promises that they can’t fulfil. In VERISIMILITUDE the protagonist discovers that love is expertly reproduced, word for word, sigh for sigh, like the ubiquitous elephant figurine in the Bazaar. In Thailand, love is sold on a stick, seasoned with sugar and spice and lightly roasted by flames leaping about like the forked tail of the devil. Caveat Emptor.”

“VERISIMILITUDE asks the most important question of our age – to what degree is the world we see around us a projection of our prejudices, beliefs and language and of the two worlds we inhabit – the reflection in the glass pane and the world beyond the glass – which is ‘reality’. In Thailand image is reality.”

“A bird is trapped by the false azure in a glass window pane. It is transfixed by the reflection not able to determine whether it is real or not. The bird must fly away to be free. In VERISIMILITUDE the protagonist must choose to stay with the woman who says she loves him or leave her, to be free.”

“VERISIMILITUDE has set the scene for the monumental struggle of belief systems on the soil-cracked battleground of the Third World. Buddhism and traditional Thai values are being threatened by the commercial imperatives that dominate the family and individual as everyone is swept up by the race along the economic superhighway.”

“VERISIMILITUDE begins and ends with the same passage in what is a Homeric cycle of trials and tribulations only to return to the place the journey started and see it for the first time. This is the archetypal Odyssean journey where the protagonist sets out to achieve modest ambitions but instead finds himself trapped by the eternal paradoxes of love and identity.”

“On one level, VERISIMILITUDE is a tale of a tortured relationship and on another allegorical level it explores the development of Thailand as an emerging Third world country grappling with corruption, nepotism and a sycophantic adoration of Western affluence and materialism.”