The Understory

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. (Mar.)