Uthis Haemamool's 'The Fabulist' Challenges Thai Historiography

Uthis Haemamool's novel 'The Fabulist', translated by Palin Ansusinha and Ploy Kingchatchaval and published by Penguin Books, targets Thailand's historiography and backslide into authoritarianism. The book features five unreliable narrators from a single small-town Thai family, whose divergent accounts collectively push back against the hegemony of official Thai history. Haemamool, author of seven novels, is part of a generation of Thai creatives angered by the country's authoritarian turn in the name of preserving religion, state, and monarchy. The novel employs metafictional techniques, including folkloric storytelling, extensive footnotes, and postmodern pyrotechnics, to create a composite of origin myths, recorded history, religious fables, and domestic drama. The Thai title 'Juti' means both death and rebirth, reflecting the novel's Buddhism-inflected thought. The work culminates in a frame story where the great-granddaughter reflects on the tyranny of singular narratives, implicating all readers in the construction of stories. The novel is the third in Haemamool's Kaeng Khoi trilogy, set in the district of Kaeng Khoi in Saraburi province, central Thailand, where Haemamool was born.