The Understory - Saneh Sangsuk

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The Understory

by
Saneh Sangsuk

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

Title:	The Understory
Author:	Saneh Sangsuk
Genre:	Novel
Written:	2003 (Eng. 2023)
Length:	173 pages
Original in:	Thai
Availability:	The Understory - US
	The Understory - UK
	The Understory - Canada
	Une histoire vieille comme la pluie - France
	Una storia vecchia come la pioggia - Italia

	from: Bookshop.org (US)

Thai title: เจ้าการะเกด
Translated by Mui Poopoksakul

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Our Assessment:

B+ : well-told, and thoroughly engaging

See our review for fuller assessment.

Review Summaries
Source	Rating	Date	Reviewer
Publishers Weekly	A	20/12/2023	.

From the Reviews:

"Sangsuk spins an evocative narrative of magic, storytelling, and the cost of economic progress in Thailand. (...) This is transfixing." - Publishers Weekly

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       The Understory centers around Luang Paw Tien, a Buddhist abbot in the Thai village of Praeknamdang. He is not: "your comme il faut sort of monk", but despite his: "unmonkly peccadilloes" he is the revered and much-loved town elder in 1967, when he is ninety-three years old.
       Luang Paw Tien: "secretly harbored ambitions of becoming a writer himself", and besides trying his hand at writing down episodes of his life-story, he also enjoys regaling the locals -- especially the children -- with his stories. The Understory presents both the then-present-day of Praeknamdang, as well as then Luang Paw Tien's stories of his youth -- what then amounts to the tale of why he chose to become a monk at the age of twenty, more than seven decades earlier.
       We're told about his stories that:

Nearly all of them were meant as frivolous entertainment and nothing more, and nearly none had a moral.

       But Luang Paw Tien's story of his childhood and youth is also a serious one. He describes himself -- several times -- as having been: "a child of the jungle", and he does grow up close and connected to nature, with the local wildlife as significant as the other humans. Along the way in the narrative, it's also noted how much has changed in the decades since -- not least with the jungle receding from the town of Praeknamdang, the land claimed for farming and other human use; The Understory is in no small part also about how Thailand has modernized during the course of (the first two-thirds of) the twentieth century.
       Luang Paw Tien's father was Old Man Junpa, who became an obsessive hunter after the death of his wife, Luang Paw Tien's mother, Mae Duangbulan, killed by a tiger that also nearly killed the then ten-year-old boy.
       Luang Paw Tien married when he was twenty, and he and his wife, Garagade, moved away from the village, to a large clearing in the jungle that they hoped to cultivate. But here, too, tigers pose a threat -- a conflict that Old Man Junpa continues to take personally.
       Saneh Sangsuk presents Luang Paw Tien's early years -- and Old Man Junpa's obsession -- vividly, making for an impressive story of the complex relationship between man and nature. Very different, but as interesting is the description of what this local world -- and Luang Paw Tien -- have become in 1967, with allusions to (then-)contemporary Thai culture and conditions. (Oddly absent, however is practically anything more than an allusion to the American presence and its activities in nearby Viet Nam at the time.)
       Luang Paw Tien -- and Saneh Sangsuk -- are gifted storytellers, with The Understory successfully hitting a number of registers, the novel shape-shifting some, very effectively, as it advances. One might wish for more from the (then-)present-day, or Luang Paw Tien's time as a monk, but what there is is thoroughly engaging, and Luang Paw Tien's (and Saneh Sangsuk's) is more than just a good yarn.

- M.A.Orthofer, 24 July 2024

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Links:

The Understory:

Peirene publicity page
Deep Vellum publicity page
Seuil publicity page
O barra O publicity page

Reviews:

Other books of interest under review:

See Index of South East Asian literature
Other books from Deep Vellum

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About the Author:

Thai author Saneh Sangsuk (เสน่ห์ สังข์สุข, publishing in THai as Dan-arun Saengthong (แดนอรัญ แสงทอง)) was born in 1957.

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