Review
Under a Demented Sky
2012
translated by Marcel Barang
ThaiFiction
Review by Peter Young in The Thai Literary Supplement #8 (March 2017).
Set in north India at the time of Gautama Buddha, the unnamed narrator used to be a minor wife of a much-despised local landowner, someone who is in desperate need of a son having already sired too many daughters. And eventually a son is born, but not a lucky one. At a young age he is bitten by a cobra, and thus begins the narrator’s frantic search far and wide for an antidote. Only, “frantic” might indeed be something of an understatement here: Saneh Sangsuk pushes his protagonist to extremes of desperation and endurance that not so much reflect actual life as the trials inflicted on mere humans by vindictive gods and malevolent spirits that one finds either in cheap comic books or mythical literature, all designed to teach a few harsh lessons about never giving up. Terrible terrain, terrible weather and terrible people continually intervene to thwart her path and try to force her to face the impossibility of her quest. And it all takes place, supposedly, in a compressed 24-hour period, pushing this tale more certainly into the region of twisted fantasy than realistic fiction. One thing Sangsuk cleverly keeps ambiguous is the possibility that despite receiving a lethal dose of venom the boy may still be alive throughout the search for his cure; this is done via the wife’s refusal to acknowledge that the boy may in fact have been dead all along as this would invalidate her journey. This faith in one impossible thing is what drives the story on a level beneath what one is actually reading: the reader wants to see how much more demented her situation can possibly get – all of which makes this a deliberately uncomfortable and challenging story.