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Library | Material Type | Item Barcode | Call Number | Status |
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Searching... Anderson - Anderson Main Library | Book | 22960002195039 | F KUPERSMIT VIOLET | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Beaufort - Hilton Head Branch | Book | 0530011293285 | FIC KUP | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Kershaw - Camden Library | Book | 33255003730836 | KUPERSMITH | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Lancaster - Indian Land Branch | Book | 30553103642387 | FIC KUPERSMITH | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
Part puzzle, part revenge tale, part ghost story, this ingenious novel spins half a century of Vietnamese history and folklore into "a thrilling read, acrobatic and filled with verve" ( The New York Times Editors' Choice).
FINALIST FOR THE CENTER FOR FICTION'S FIRST NOVEL PRIZE * LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION * ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, NPR, Good Housekeeping, Kirkus Reviews
"Fiction as daring and accomplished as Violet Kupersmith's first novel reignites my love of the form and its kaleidoscopic possibilities."--David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas
Two young women go missing decades apart. Both are fearless, both are lost. And both will have their revenge.
1986 : The teenage daughter of a wealthy Vietnamese family loses her way in an abandoned rubber plantation while fleeing her angry father and is forever changed.
2011 : A young, unhappy Vietnamese American woman disappears from her new home in Saigon without a trace.
The fates of these two women are inescapably linked, bound together by past generations, by ghosts and ancestors, by the history of possessed bodies and possessed lands. Alongside them, we meet a young boy who is sent to a boarding school for the métis children of French expatriates, just before Vietnam declares its independence from colonial rule; two Frenchmen who are trying to start a business with the Vietnam War on the horizon; and the employees of the Saigon Spirit Eradication Co., who find themselves investigating strange occurrences in a farmhouse on the edge of a forest. Each new character and timeline brings us one step closer to understanding what binds them all.
Build Your House Around My Body takes us from colonial mansions to ramshackle zoos, from sweaty nightclubs to the jostling seats of motorbikes, from ex-pat flats to sizzling back-alley street carts. Spanning more than fifty years of Vietnamese history and barreling toward an unforgettable conclusion, this is a time-traveling, heart-pounding, border-crossing fever dream of a novel that will haunt you long after the last page.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Kupersmith's exceptional debut novel (after the collection The Frangipani Hotel) offers profound and original insight on Vietnam's tortured history. Twenty-two-year-old Winnie, a mixed-race American woman, signs up to teach English in Saigon in an attempt to connect with the Vietnamese part of her heritage, and essentially dooms herself to failure: "her life would continue to be as empty as her luggage, wherever she went," Kupersmith writes. Winnie figures out how to placate her students by helping them learn American terms such as "booty call" and "loaded nachos," and enters a more or less satisfactory romantic relationship with a fellow teacher, but then disappears. At this point, the chapters range widely beyond Winnie's present-day story to the days, months, and years before and after her disappearance. These vivid vignettes--horrifying and hilarious by turns--are marvelously written and include nightmarish scenes of immolation, two-headed snakes, and other accounts of disappearing young women, as well as a memorable team of ghost hunters and a soul-swapping dog. The multiple pages of maps and dramatis personae at the novel's opening help ground the reader through this disorienting but captivating opus, until the clues and characters coalesce in a way that's both surprising and satisfying. Magic can be both benevolent and monstrous in Kupersmith's work, and here she indelibly illustrates the ways in which Vietnam's legacies of colonialism, war, and violence against women continue to haunt. This more than fulfills the promise of her first book. (July)
Guardian Review
The twin spectres of colonialism and sexualised violence lurk in the humid Vietnamese air as two-headed snakes slither underfoot in Violet Kupersmith's marvellous and confounding debut novel. Build Your House Around My Body is structured around the disappearance of 22-year-old Winnie, a Vietnamese American who arrives in Saigon in 2010 to teach English and ostensibly reconnect with her heritage. Yet the self-effacing, anxious Winnie seems more intent on drowning her inhibitions in meaningless sex and lukewarm beer. She feels an affinity neither with her expat colleagues nor the locals, but with the stray dogs who roam her street, "rangy and keen jawed and encrusted with ticks ... mixed breeds, like she was, and dirty like she was too". Neither white nor Asian enough to feel comfortable with either designation, Winnie's biracial identity renders her a perpetual outsider burdened by microaggressions and self-loathing. Interwoven with Winnie's story are spooky vignettes taking place in the days and decades before and after her vanishing. In some of the novel's most thrilling and original sections, we follow ghost hunters from the Saigon Spirit Eradication Co in 2011, encounter a Vietnamese French schoolboy left on a mountain as the Japanese launch their coup in 1945, and meet a trio of childhood friends in the early 90s - the bland brothers Tan and Long, who pine for the headstrong and rather caricaturish Binh. The reader gradually gleans connections between the stories in ingenious or sometimes convoluted ways. Kupersmith has been compared to David Mitchell for her novel's time-hopping cast of characters and sweeping ambition. However, with its seam of delightfully lurid feminist body horror, Build Your House Around My Body more closely recalls the fabulist work of Kelly Link, Intan Paramaditha and Mariana Enríquez. The book is certainly not for the squeamish - Kupersmith isn't afraid to delve into the abject and grotesque, bringing to mind Asian horror movies such as the 2004 Thai film Shutter or the Japanese films Ringu and Dark Water. Haunting the narrative is a sinister smoke monster which might have escaped from the famously perplexing American television series Lost, a smoke that "could not have its own memories, because it was already a memory of a sort". Perhaps the smoke monster functions as a manifestation of the "irreversibly transfigured" soul of a land riven by colonial brutality. Perhaps the two-headed snake that keeps popping up is a metaphor for personal and political betrayal. It is left to the reader to derive deeper resonances from the body in a well or the soul-swapping little dog - or simply to take these elements at face value and enjoy the funhouse ride. At their strongest, the novel's descriptive powers and sense of place are vivid and intoxicating. Published during a time of social distancing and travel restrictions, it effectively transports the reader from eerie forests to rundown zoos, via the pulsating, overcrowded belly of a Saigon club with "membrane-pink walls under hazy aquatic lighting ... and [a] pervasive saline aroma from the many sweaty bodies inside". However, at other moments the descriptions are overegged or too technical. Framing the disparate strands around Winnie's disappearance can jolt the reader out of more engaging plotlines, most notably that of the ghost hunters. Disaffected millennial heroines are everywhere at the moment, with memorable examples in Kylie Whitehead's Cronenbergian horror novel Absorbed and Raven Leilani's biting social satire Luster. However, the maudlin, morose Winnie lacks the droll humour and fleeting self-awareness of Whitehead and Leilani's protagonists, and it becomes challenging to remain sympathetic with her, much less feel invested in the dragged-out mystery of her disappearance. When Winnie's strand finally merges with Binh's, it feels as though the story is just taking off, before reaching a cryptic and rather abrupt conclusion. In the interview accompanying the text, Kupersmith explains that she wrote Build Your House Around My Body as a kind of revenge story and a way to process "the anger [she] had witnessed against women ... the kind of violence that was so accepted that it was just something ordinary". She loves writing about ghosts because "they can claim all the agency and power that was denied to them while they were still alive". This theme of justice and retribution is buried under the weight of a somewhat overcomplicated polyphonic narrative - Kupersmith is a naturally talented storyteller, but I do wonder if the cumulative effect of the novel would have been stronger if the strands were streamlined and made easier to follow. Nonetheless, an excess of ideas and imagination is hardly a bad thing for a novelist; this is a hugely impressive debut that signals even greater things to come.
Kirkus Review
A wide-ranging first novel that peels back the layers of a haunted Vietnam. Winnie is just 22 when she moves in with her great aunt and two surly cousins in Saigon to teach English at the Achievement! International Language Academy. Winnie feels herself to be unexceptional in every way: Half White American, half Vietnamese, she sees herself as having "the muddy ambiguity of the middle." (In a "taupe" bathroom stall, she gloomily wonders if she is blending into the walls.) She's also a frankly terrible English teacher, and she lives in fear of being found out by her zealous expat colleagues. But Winnie is finally settling into life in Saigon with her boyfriend, Long, when she suddenly goes missing. Kupersmith, herself of Vietnamese heritage, interweaves Winnie's life in Vietnam with other people's stories, all linked together by a supernatural bond: There's the daughter of a prominent pepper company owner, who disappeared into the forest a generation before Winnie and was rescued under mysterious circumstances. There's the team at Saigon Spirit Eradication, a kind of Vietnamese Ghostbusters, only the head of the organization, known as the Fortune Teller, is not what he appears to be. The novel also dips into Vietnam's pre- and post-colonial history with French characters to explore the ways in which war creates another kind of hauntedness. There's even a possessed dog. Any description of the book could make it sound like too many spinning plates, but Kupersmith manages the whirl with dexterity and confidence. The novel is epic enough in scope to require a character list and several pages of maps, but the pages fly as the reader is compelled to figure out how all the narratives will eventually collide. Drawing from genres as diverse as horror, humor, and historical fiction, Kupersmith creates a rich and dazzling spectacle. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
In her second novel, Kupersmith (The Frangipani Hotel, 2014) combines elements of horror, mystery, and historical and literary fiction to create a strange and wondrous story. Winnie, a 22-year-old Vietnamese-American, is living in Vietnam ostensibly to teach English but really in an attempt to re-create herself. Sadly, she finds herself even more lost than in the U.S., as a lonely, terrible teacher, still caught between her half white American and half Vietnamese selves. Shortly after Winnie moves in with Long, her sort-of boyfriend, she disappears. Subsequent chapters, all starting with a time before or after the disappearance, introduce a variety of characters: a pepper farmer's daughter who disappeared in a rubber-tree forest that has since burned and been taken over by snakes; a fortune teller with terrifying supernatural capabilities who heads the Saigon Spirit Eradication Company; two young brothers who are both in love with their best friend; and Frenchmen, 69 years before Violet's disappearance, who reflect Vietnam's colonial history. Kupersmith expertly ties these characters together through plot and reccurring talismans--snakes, a dog, a lottery ticket, a policeman's hat--and magically manages to create a story both epic and intensely intimate. Patient and observant readers will be richly rewarded.
Library Journal Review
The author of LJ-starred The Frangipani Hotel ranges across a half-century of Vietnamese history as she tells the stories of three troubled women: a teenager who's permanently traumatized after getting lost while fleeing her furious father, a woman who captures a rare two-headed cobra to please a former lover, and a young American in contemporary Saigon whose boyfriend disappears.