The Understory

Starred review from January 22, 2024
Sangsuk (White Shadow) spins an evocative narrative of magic, storytelling, and the cost of economic progress in Thailand. In the first part, Sangsuk regales the reader with gossip of late monk Luang Paw Tien and his mysterious knack with animals (he adopted an ox that was marked for slaughter and survived a stampede of elephants). These miraculous accounts of Paw Tien are braided with touchstones of mid-20th-century Thai history, such as the emergence of the Volunteer Defense Corps to protect civilians in “reddish” border zones (at one point, a friend of Paw Tien weeps after fatally shooting his own best friend in a skirmish, then rationalizes the incident because the dead man was a communist). The second part tells Paw Tien’s story in his own words, relating how he and his father, Old Man Jumpa, suffered in their quest to protect their village from the tigers that lived in the surrounding jungle. What transpires is a moving folk story about a lost world where occultists could shape shift into animals and tiger-demons could take human form, which builds toward the tragedy that sets Paw Tien on his path of penance and monkhood. This is transfixing.

March 1, 2024
A monk's tales of adaptation and awe, of humans and the more-than-human. Sangsuk's novel, translated from the Thai by Poopoksakul, introduces us to a nonagenarian monk named Luang Paw Tien, who shares fantastical accounts of jungle life in Thailand before his village's transition to large-scale farming and urban development. An eccentric and charismatic figure, Luang Paw Tien has retained a childlike wonder into old age and is beloved by the children who listen to his storytelling. A repository of traditional knowledge, he tells them of "a time when human settlements had been something foreign, and their accompanying fields, orchards, farms and paddies foreign land." The present, we learn, has fallen under "the shadow of decline and deterioration," which includes the imaginative banality of modern commercial life. But Luang Paw Tien's stories--full of sensuously rich descriptions of a teeming ecosystem's flora and fauna and of the humans who merely inhabit rather than dominate it--conjure a world of enchanted life and captivating mystery. Elephants, tigers, monkeys, boars, snakes, crocodiles, and bats take their place as charismatic protagonists here, often in tales with supernatural dimensions. Routine human practices such as hunting or rice farming are rendered evocatively and take on their own mythic significance. The novel's extraordinary climax arrives with Luang Paw Tien's account of how he became a monk through a terrifying battle with a demonic beast, whose assault begins with the killing of an ox: "I followed the prints, and the bloody marks around them, which seemed to grow bigger and bigger and more intensely red, and a chill ran down my spine when I saw them joined by the paw prints of a tiger, which suddenly materialized on top of and among [the ox's] hoofprints." This is a captivating and delightful work. A charming, engrossing, profound exploration of the transformative power of stories.

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