SONGS ON ENDLESS REPEAT: Essays and Outtakes,
by Anthony Veasna So. Read by Keong Sim.
As you download the audiobook version of
Anthony Veasna So’s
second posthumously published book, you might wonder how he’d have felt about “Songs on Endless Repeat” being in the public eye (and ear).
We’ll never know. Eight months before his debut story collection, “
Afterparties,”
came out in 2021, So died suddenly, at 28. Whether he wanted them out there or not, the essays and short fiction in this second collection have the same crisp humor and edgy vulnerability that made his first an instant best seller.
With a foreword from So’s teacher and adviser Jonathan Dee, but little insight into how the book came to be, “Songs on Endless Repeat” presents an unusual mash-up of new and previously published work, playing out over seven mellifluous hours in the voice of the actor Keong Sim. There are So’s trademark takes — slightly caustic, unflinchingly honest — on reality television, “Crazy Rich Asians,” trading computer science for visual art at Stanford and retiling his father’s rental properties in his hometown of Stockton, Calif.
But the audiobook’s most memorable passages come from “Straight Thru Cambotown,” So’s unfinished novel about three young Cambodian Americans reckoning with the death of an aunt. As Vinny, Molly and Darren blunder through carefully prescribed mourning rituals, they also contend with their family’s legacy of suffering.
“I have less in common with mainstream Asians,” Darren says, “than, say, middle-aged Jewish people.” As he puts it, they, too, “have parents who either survived or died in a genocide!”
You can hear that unexpected exclamation point in Keong Sim’s voice, which channels So’s humor, snark and Khmer references with aplomb.
As he nears the end of the final essay, “Baby Yeah,” the narrator’s cadence slows and becomes more serious, hinting at trouble. So walks us, heartbreakingly, through the months before the death of a close friend: “We were full of giddy potential, love for idiotic jokes, fuzzy notions begging to be clarified into true art, until one of us peered into the foreseeable future, or maybe the next gray day, and decided living wasn’t worth the trouble.”
So’s true art lives on inside his books, now an everlasting loop that will never get old.
SONGS ON ENDLESS REPEAT: Essays and Outtakes | By Anthony Veasna So | Read by Keong Sim | HarperAudio | 6 hours, 58 minutes