Build Your House Around My Body, by Violet Kupersmith (2021)
This novel defies description. The novel mainly focuses on Winnie, a young Vietnamese-American woman, who moved to Saigon ostensibly to teach English and to connect with her Vietnamese heritage. She is very unhappy and drowns herself in beer and sex. We know from the first page that she will disappear without a trace.
The novel seamless moves from the present to the past and back again, through French colonization to the Japanese coup in the 1940s, with brief references to the Vietnamese War. We meet a marvelous assortment of odd characters, from a Khmer-French schoolboy who was left in a rubber plantation in the 1940s, to the Fortune Teller, to the brothers Tan and Long, to the young Binh, who disappeared decades before Winnie. Interwove through these characters is the supernatural and superstitions inherent in rural Vietnamese culture.
The author slowly peels away the layers, and slowly the connections between all these characters becomes evident.
This book won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but I absolutely loved it.
Read: January b28, 2023
5 Stars
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