Eva Demski Das siamesische Dorf (The Siamese Village) Suhrkamp Verlag, February 2006, 380 pp. ISBN 3-518-41740-1 It was the poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger who warned that tourism destroys what it seeks. This racy, rackety but also painfully caustic novel illustrates that maxim perfectly. Without ever becoming boring or preachy, its author manages to combine a highly entertaining, no-holds-barred narrative with serious criticism of the ruthless take-over by powerful economic interests of so-called tropical paradises, followed by the complete annihilation of all vestiges of indigenous culture. Her method is simple. Send a raggle-taggle group of West Europeans to a hitherto unspoilt Thai coastal resort. Throw in a world-weary German manager, a mysterious and beautiful Thai housekeeper known as ‘Madame’, a thoroughly depraved Thai houseboy, some shady mafia-type characters, local as well as international, a sinister monk who presides over a vegetarian python, and a monastery located at the entrance to a cave which contains a lake famous for its healing powers. Add a vanishing tourist, a decrepit paedophile pop star and Elvis impersonator, various unhappy couples, a millionairess in search of a cure for her terminal cancer, and two journalists – Kecki, a hack travel writer now well past her best, and her old friend and ex-lover Max, a brooding photo-journalist. Choose as a setting a luxuriously rigged-out but filthy tourist ghetto and – as a finishing touch – have various parts of a dismembered body appear in the most unlikely places – a hand in a ghost house, for instance, or a head in Madame’s deep-freeze. Readers must be left to unravel for themselves the countless intricacies of this astonishingly inventive plot. It involves, as villains in chief, a number of international companies who plan to build a tourist empire of hotels and clinics (with illegal services as ‘extras’), where they will fleece the money-stashed sick and elderly with whom Europe is now so well provided. Anyone who opposes them is murdered, and a local village which happens to be in their way is burned to the ground, killing most of its inhabitants. Whether this is quite the reading for the more scrupleridden type of deckchair holidaymaker in Thailand may perhaps be open to question. But for the rest of us it’s a must.