Build Your House Around My Body by Violet Kupersmith (Random House)
How far will far will we go to find the life we were meant to live? How do we learn to use what lives inside us, haunting us?
Winnie Nguyen, half Vietnamese, half white American, comes to Saigon on a one-way ticket, bringing with her “a passport, two sets of clean clothes, and her own flesh.” The suitcase she carries is almost empty. So is Winnie. She becomes an English teacher because it’s the easiest job for a foreigner to get, she reads cheap novels as her class pretends to work on amorphous assignments, she buys clothes in drab colors that will let her fade into the background. She has no friends yet no reason to return home. When she disappears, nobody, not even the man who has taken her into his life and his bed, has any idea where she might have gone. Winnie has lived without a trace and her disappearance mirrors the way she lived.
Binh is an orphan, brought up by relatives. She’s a rebel, a child without fear, who’s followed faithfully by two brothers. When the boys grow up and leave her, Binh remains in the village, still a girl who follows no rules and has no ambition, until she becomes obsessed with revenge.
Winnie is a woman who has never felt at home in her body. Binh has never been at rest within hers. They wouldn’t have ever met if not for the two brothers who loved Binh and left her when they went off to live in Saigon. Long, the younger brother, has tried his best to love Winnie. Tan, the older of the two, has been cursed by a death that troubles his dreams and brings Binh back into his life.
This novel begins with a page that holds the names of all the characters, followed by several detailed maps. They are essential clues to the story, which moves with what seems to be a dizzying incoherence between 21st century Saigon and the highlands of Vietnam from colonial times through the Japanese occupation. The characters are so diverse that they seem random. They are not. Each one of them, from the homesick French farmer who yearns for the taste of gougère to the peasant girl who is seduced by a dissolute plantation-owner, from a fortune-teller who can transform his face into a mask of inhuman flexibility to a wealthy villager’s beautiful daughter who goes missing in a forest that’s infested with venomous snakes—they all carry clues to solving the jigsaw puzzle that Violet Kupersmith has skillfully constructed.
The ghosts of Southeast Asia are a horrific lot that put the pallid spectres of the West to shame. Kupersmith has added a new one to the pantheon, one that can become either a blessing and a torture. But this is not just a ghost story, or a mystery, although it combines both of these elements. Within its rich and enigmatic plot is a satirical examination of expats in a world that they try desperately to sanitize, a portrait of Saigon that embraces its ugliness as firmly as it describes the city’s allure, the psychological dissection of an unraveling personality, and the fragmented history of lost girls who each find their own way of belonging in the world.
Kupersmith has written a novel so compelling that it’s tempting to race through it in one sitting yet it’s complicated enough that it calls for another reading to immediately follow the first. She’s created a world that’s both repulsive and seductive—one that’s gone unvisited until she brought it into life.~Janet Brown