Bangkok Days, due out in June, is Osborne’s sixth book. It arrives in the wake of 2006′s The Naked Tourist, a sensual romp through India and Southeast Asia fraught with medical mishaps and epiphanies on the nature of travel. A New York City resident for the past 17 years, Osborne first traveled to Bangkok in 1990. He returned frequently for the inexpensive health care, and on assignments for The New York Times Magazine, for whom he has written articles on psychiatry and medicine. He has since established himself as a kind of romantic anthropologist: following his characters into dissipation, then rising from the ooze and appraising them – and himself – with a lucid, journalistic eye.

Who are his characters? Certainly not the young hedonists of Alex Garland‘s The Beach. “The young are happy,” Osborne says, “and I’m not interested in that. I’m more interested in what happens when people hit this weird invisible wall and give up hope.” Hence the adorably lascivious old men that populate Bangkok Days. Dennis, a retired bank manager from Australia, spends his time painting watercolors and purchasing underpriced Viagra. Of sex with a young Thai woman (named, incidentally, Porntip), he confesses: “It’s pleasure, not happiness, but I am happy with that – if you see what I mean.” Farlo, a foul-mouthed, bullet-headed Scotsman, keeps an eco-lodge in a mine-riddled region of Cambodia, where he takes his two or three annual tourists deer hunting with ex-members of the Khmer Rouge.

Osborne uses these men, as W.G. Sebald used his own alienated wanderers, to explore the idea of loneliness and the disappearance of the past. Bangkok – home of the largest sex-change facility in the world, where shrines rot in the shadows of iPod billboards and the Beverly Hills Polo Club – is an ideal place for him to observe. What he finds startling is how happy – or, at least, content – his expatriates appear to be. Westerners move to Bangkok, he writes, not only for the “culture of complete physicality,” but “precisely because they can never understand it.” For lost souls, he implies, losing oneself in an arcane environment may be just as valuable as finding oneself.

Bangkok holds for Osborne the sort of mystical power that Greece held for Henry Miller, who, in The Colossus of Maroussi, celebrated the country’s “passion, contradictoriness, confusion, chaos.” Osborne works in the same lineage as Miller; he has the same man-in-the-street sensibility, interest in ugliness, and mad enthusiasm for life. But he’s more restrained than the author of Tropic of Cancer, content to leave elliptical the rowdier bacchanals he must have witnessed. The book loses none of its strength through these omissions – instead, they reveal the amount of respect Osborne holds for the “chaotic ease” of Bangkok, which has nourished, in one way or another, so many of his fellow exiles.

And here’s Forbes‘ review:

Makes a Hard Man Humble

Bangkok, the capital and most densely populated city in Thailand, draws close to 15 million visitors per year. Some seek the liberation of becoming lost among 8 million inhabitants. Others come in search of love and beauty. For a select few who wish to escape their past, Bangkok also promises an opportunity for rebirth, both psychological and physical.

It is simply inexpensive dentistry, though, that first brings Lawrence Osborne to Bangkok. Then, as an unassuming observer, he peels back the popular assumptions widely held about the city. In Bangkok Days: A Sojourn in the Capital of Pleasure, Osborne revels in the intersection of the sacred and the profane.

Osborne contrasts ancient Buddhist temples frequented by pious monks with hedonistic modern nightclubs and the men who entertain themselves there. To his credit, he avoids the expected stereotypes. For example, he illustrates the sensuality of the city through epicurean escapades. In the “quivering beginning of night,” a quest for exotic food drives Osborne to wander the streets. “I wanted strange foods,” Osborne tells the reader, “things that would break me open, take me to the further side of taboo.”

As for the 200,000 women working what Osborne calls “the twilight game,” they become a symbol of enviable anonymity rather than sex. Osborne notes their ability to blend into a society that barely notices them. He, on the other hand, physically looming above the Bangkok locals, stands out like “a genetic accident that couldn’t be reversed.”

But Bangkok is a place where even genetics can be challenged. Osborne is transfixed by kathoey, men who turn themselves into women. He explores the idea that sexual transformation is an extension of the Buddhist belief in reincarnation. Osborne fixates on an apparition-like vision of a kathoey releasing a catfish into the river. He draws a parallel to the farang who also seek rebirth and a new beginning in Bangkok.

Osborne traces the quest to re-create oneself back to Anna Leonowens, governess to Thai Monarch Rama IV at the second half of the 19th century. Anna is better known for inspiring the 1956 film The King and I, a tale of a monarch who himself undergoes a transformation of character. Osborne suggests that Anna is the first farang to “use Siam/Thailand as a place to reinvent herself.”

The foreigners Osborne befriends also wish to liberate themselves from a former life and start afresh. The “wonderfully sinister” McGinnis is a man without a past, whose true profession and background no one can quite confirm, and Dennis the Australian is a widower whose former married life is an implausible mystery. With only a vague understanding of each man’s past, these acquaintances focus only on the present life each has made for himself in Bangkok.

These characters also become a facility through which Osborne illustrates the seedier aspects of the city. It is this collection of shady acquaintances who draw Osborne out of his apartment and on sordid exploits through the city nightlife. But ironically, it is through descriptions of the time he spends in the company of friends, rather than alone, that Osborne most poignantly illustrates the theme of lonesomeness in this crowded Thai city.