The Fabulist

A polyphonic reimagining of Thai history, sweeping across the earth’s creation to the speculated future

Set in the district of Kaeng Khoi, Saraburi province, Thailand, The Fabulist is Uthis Haemamool’s 2015 epic novel that offers a palimpsestic account of one family’s tales and traumas in a sweeping polyphony of voices. Drawing upon local myths, folk tales and annals, their stories traverse across centuries of familiar historical markers—Buddhist myths, the Cold War era, the recent political movements in 2010s to the speculated future—to explore the violence of feudalism, paternalism, patriarchy and modernisation passed onto contemporary Thai society. But pulsing across these historical terrains are the storytellers’ desires to rewrite themselves into a history that relegated them into mere ghosts or victims of madness. In feverish torrents of accents, tones and timbres of voices, we experience the fleshliness of their once hollowed identity in their struggle to reclaim their narratives through the diverse acts of storytelling.
Written as a hybrid between diary entry and investigative novel, Volume 4 is the story of the Ghost Writer’s confrontation with the conflicts of his past that resurfaces along with the ripples of his family’s trauma. When his mother asks for the Ghost Writer, Prateep, to sell his share of land inherited from his late father, Prateep returns to his hometown in Kaeng Khoi to deal with the paperwork, only to find himself and his family beset by debt, madness, violence, imprisonment and death—all of which he attempts to deal by writing them into fiction. The story offers a scathing critique of the country’s severe inequality: poverty, addiction, education, the legal system and patriarchal burdens that corrode one family’s relationships.
Volume 5 is told through the voice of Maya, the daughter of Maitree and great granddaughter of the Old Woman in Volume 1. Her spontaneous and unfiltered meditations on time, history and language, which demonstrates the poetic philosophical musings and sharpness of a literary critic, cut through the dishevelled seams of the stories told by the other characters in the novel, simultaneously unravelling
and entangling them together in new and unexpected ways by situating them into historical contexts that were never mentioned by its original storyteller, such as the colonial history of Buddhism, the state persecution of communists in the 60s–70s, and the Yellow and Red Shirts movements before the 2014 military coup.