Toward the end of the Afterword to his novel The Understory, Thai author Saneh Sangsuk, having acknowledged the myriad of sources and resources that informed his tale, describes just how his work originated and quickly assumed a life of its own:
One day in early 2002, I had set out to write a short story, which was meant to be a very short story. What I had had in mind was a ghost story precisely of the kind often subject to ridicule. But after two paragraphs, The Understory began to take shape. The story that I had started had shifted toward a new direction, and I, considerably irritated and discouraged, submitted to it, watched it from afar, to see how it would unfold.
To imagine a potential novel-length work asserting itself after only two paragraphs, is an indication that the seeds of the tale had possibly been simmering the writer’s imagination for decades, but it’s also important to recognize that each paragraph in the final printed edition of this book extends for at least ten pages or more. So that is a little more of a runway than it first sounds. Nonetheless, if Sangsuk found himself so immediately swept up in his own creation, that same energy is fully transmitted to the reader in this engrossing tale of an inveterate storyteller determined to share the magic of a disappearing habitat and the wisdom of a fading culture before it is too late.
The third person narrative of the first quarter or so of The Understory introduces the village of Praeknamdang, a small farming community in Thailand, and the eccentric ninety-three year-old abbot of the local temple, Luang Paw Tien. Seventy-three years into his monkhood, this ancient man still continues his daily alms walk, some seven kilometres long, accompanied by his beloved ox, a practice he will maintain until illness and old age finally claim him years later. By then, the village will be on the verge of being abandoned. But when this story takes place, or rather, when the story within this story is told, it is the winter of 2510 BE, or 1967 CE, and Luang Paw Tien is still defying his age and actively engaged in his community. This year, however, has been a difficult one, marked by a flood that devastated the season’s rice crop. The villagers, young and old, are despondent, and their loving monk is worried about them. At night, as everyone gathers around a communal fire, he joins them as usual. He was always welcome. Night after night, he would entertain the villagers with stories drawn from his long journey to India to visit the Buddha’s birthplace, or with one of the countless tales—funny, spooky, or fantastic—that comprised his regular repertoire of entertainments. “To the serious-minded adults, he was the teller of tall tales who breached the precept concerning monks and untruthful speech, but to the children, he was a trove of magical stories.”
Yet, on this particular night, he feels that he has run out of stories and hand-me-down tales. His thoughts are troubled:
Whenever the old bhikkhu thought of the fates of the men and women and children of Praeknamdang, a terrible gloom would wash over him and fill his heart. The shadow of decline and deterioration had long loomed over those fields, and that shadow now seemed to be growing ever larger and more intense, since large swaths of the jungle had been destroyed, and it seemed he was the only one able to sense the ruinous omens. The dull hums of tragedy emanating from beneath the ground were as powerful as tsunamis, and it seemed he was the only one able to sense their menace. The village was soon to become deserted, and that it would be deserted seemed inescapable. The natives and their children and grandchildren would one day be relegated to the position of serfs because, even in those years, rights to the land that had from time immemorial belonged to the people of Praeknamdang were falling into the hands of people from elsewhere.
Aware that the adults may already to be lost to this inevitable state of affairs, Luang Paw Tien decides to turn his full attention to the eager and attentive children gathered around him and launches into a personal account of his own childhood and early adulthood—an account that begins with a little historical context and soon erupts into a lively monologue featuring his eccentric hunter father, Old Man Jumpa, his patient farmer mother, Mae Duangbulan, and an ongoing life and death battle with the jungle’s most feared inhabitant, the tiger.
The world in which Luang Paw Tien grew up was one in which the dense jungle with all its riches and dangers hovered close around Praeknamdang, and shaped both the lives and the imaginations of the villagers. As a child of the forest, Luang Paw Tien was acquainted with its magic and its perils from a young age, but one stood above all:
In the jungle, even in the full light of day, even when I was trekking with Old Man Junpa or with other grownups, a tiger’s growl, however far away it was, made my heart skip a beat. And during those times when I was less than well-behaved and wandered off playing, as children do, a tiger’s growl, even from afar, even in the full light of day, triggered a rash of goosebumps all over my body. When a tiger revealed itself, no matter where, all the different animals would call out frenzied, panicked warnings to their own kind, and next thing you knew, silence would spread through that part of the jungle.
When the tiger does strike close to home, in a deadly and horrifying way, the future monk is only ten years old it changes the course of his life quickly. But, seasoned storyteller that he is, he allows the story to unfold slowly, somehow managing to maintain the level of excitement and throughout.
As narrator, Lunag Paw Tien is openly blending a mix of folklore and fact, reminding his listeners that there once were beliefs and practices that might now sound strange to those who have grown up in world where the jungle has been pushed back and somewhat tamed in the interest of agriculture. But when he young, the jungle was still capable of keeping man in his place. As an author, Saneh Sangsuk, draws on a wealth of materials to evoke a disappeared way of life. He demonstrates a deep respect for nature and traditional practices, one that comes through no matter how eccentric and larger-than-life his characters and story may be. That is because
The Understory is, above all, a celebration of the power of oral storytelling. As such, the most infectious element of this novel lies in the rhythmic energy and flow of the narrative which is captured to great effect in Mui Poopoksakul’s translation. In an interview for Asymptote, she describes how meticulous he is with language and how sensitive he is to its musicality. She says that when she first started working with him, she was surprised that he could state the exact length of time it should take to read any one of his works. She thought it might be some kind of exaggeration:
But as it turned out, he just has a very clear idea of how his texts should sound. I don’t know if he’s actually timed it, but when you talk to him, it almost feels like he has, because he has such a specific idea of the flow. It was only after I spent a lot of time talking with him that I realized that he was not kidding when he said those numbers. And so, working on his texts, I have to be hyper-aware of rhythm.
Her translation so adeptly captures the a musical flow in English, that this text, with its long unbroken paragraphs, moves at such a keenly calibrated pace and just the right level of sustained suspense that it is an absolute delight to read.
The Understory by Saneh Sangsuk is translated from the Thai by Mui Poopoksakul and published in North America by Deep Vellum. The UK edition is published by Peirene.
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