The white shadow: Portrait of the artist as a young rascal by Saneh Sangsuk

The white shadow: Portrait of the artist as a young rascal Reviews

• 
  Steve

  
  
  Saneh Sangsuk (b. 1957)
  
  
  The literature of one of my favorite countries - Thailand - is little known outside of its borders, but one of the reasons it is known at all is Marcel Barang, who has been translating Thai literary fiction into English and French since the 1980's. For a brief time in the '90s his translations appeared in a lovely, uniformly bound series that I quickly learned to purchase at Kinokuniya and Asia Books in the Emporium every time I was in Bangkok. The publisher of that series let it lapse, but the occasional translation from Barang's hand appears yet among the offerings of Western publishers, and one of these I have just read with occasionally dampened pleasure, though, all told, the advantages of this text outweigh the longueurs.
  
  A jack of many trades through necessity, Saneh Sangsuk, using the pen name of Dan-arun Saengthong, published the reportedly first stream of consciousness novel in the language, เงาสีขาว (translated by Marcel Barang into both English as White Shadow: Portrait of the Artist As a Young Rascal and French as L'Ombre Blanche: Portrait de l'artiste en jeune vaurien; I read the latter since French is Barang's mother tongue), in 1994 to what was initially, at best, a lukewarm reception in Thailand.(*) Outside of Thailand, however, it has already been translated into seven languages.
  
  
  
  From the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Bangkok
  
  
  A lengthy text reproducing the stream of consciousness of a 30-something Thai holed up in an isolated and decaying teak house in Thailand's north trying to come to grips with his girlfriend's suicide and his largely wasted life, White Shadow is told in an often breathless rush, each chapter a single enormous paragraph with the characters and events flowing through each other in a very nonlinear manner. In the mad rush of words - repetitive, spiraling and colliding with one another - the self-obsessed young man's life is slowly revealed to the wondering reader. Born to an increasingly mad father and suicidal mother, the young protagonist is shunted off to a family friend, a soldier who means well but whose duties entail that the youngster is left alone for lengthy periods of time (like months and months). In Thailand during the '70's social workers were scarce. He finds himself torn between delinquency, chasing the fairer sex and an increasing interest in literature.
  
  From fantasy and bitter humor through hard-bitten, open-eyed, merciless observation and the most sophomoric self-delusion, the narrator (who addresses himself in the second person for much of the book) runs the gamut, vacillating between self-loathing and self-pity, between intense efforts of literary ambition and long periods of drug-enhanced anomie. And - oh joy - one gets deep inside the mind of the heterosexual misogynist.(**) With all the whipsawing between moods and the many locations from the far south to the far north of the country, with lush descriptions of Thai life from the universities to the seediest Bangkok underbelly comes the slow revelation of the protagonist's errors, nay, crimes. This is an enormous, bulging-at-the-seams, cautionary slice of life.
  
  But for me to completely enjoy swimming through a character's consciousness for 490 pages, he should have more engaging thoughts than this young man does. Nonetheless, the contradictions and the mediocrity of the protagonist are certainly true to life, and for the first time I really felt embedded in a Thai life. Not that I haven't previously read Thai novels that evoke a portion of a life in an extremely vivid and gripping manner, but this intimate, detailed novel of the becoming of the main character and his painful taking stock of the dead end he has landed in is certainly a first in my readings of Thai literature. It is an anti-Bildungsroman in which optimism is sorely out of place.
  
  In an interview given after he was awarded the 2014 SEA Write prize for another book (which has been translated as Venom And Other Stories), Khun Saneh's defiance is palpable, and the following quote is quite relevant to White Shadow, which he still views as his best work.
  
  "The rule and criteria are ancient. This prize is narrow-minded. It answers to the middle-class taste and it still concerns itself with the kind of writing that promotes morality. Well, the world is bigger than that, the judges should step outside of their universities sometimes," says the writer. "Literary merit is about beauty, yes, but it's also about smut, vulgarity, excrement, vileness — you know what I mean, help me come up with other words if you could — because they're part of the same thing."
  
  
  (*) I read online that the self-published novel sold less than one thousand copies, leaving Saneh destitute.
  
  (**) I have been given to understand that the novel is largely autobiographical.
• 
  Shubhakiyarti

  Hold your breath!!!....this Thai novel isn't typical Thai-Kitschy novel.It deflects everythings in a Thai University student's life, dark side or lighted side.In an oudstanding but dazzling style of writing that can make you easily pass out or puts unbearable weight upon you.Saying that Saneh is only one thai writer who is closed to Nobel Prize and he's deserved it.