The Truth

Kaya York tries to comprehend Everything.

- Kaya York

The night that Boonsri Amudee discovered The Truth she felt rather empty. After fervently writing down her basic insight until the early hours, she brewed a cup of sweet tea and watched the sun rise with no thoughts in her head. “I finished my tea,” she said in a later interview, “walked home, made normal love with my spouse, and dreamed about a featureless sphere.”

Her findings were published five years later in the ten-thousand-plus page tome The Truth. The first draft had been incomprehensible, as alien to any reader as the landscape of the Moon. Amudee responded to this problem by releasing another book, How to Interpret ‘The Truth’, alongside an additional sequel, How to Interpret ‘How to Interpret “The Truth”’ just for good measure. She left it at that, feeling that two levels of recursion were quite enough. (Although later, gradually, debates grew, even outside the usual literary circles, about how exactly to interpret How to Interpret ‘How to Interpret “The Truth”’.)

The Truth was found, drawn and quartered, subjected to the proper book-keeping, and available in the ‘T’ section of all major bookstores (the ‘ค’ section in Thailand, of course, and so on: translation into other languages was less difficult than expected).

The critical responses took years to emerge, and are exemplified by William Jacobson’s brief review: “Yes, I think that about sums it up.”