This is such an original novel, a riveting, non-chronological plot with a cast of real and supernatural characters. Starting in 2010 Saigon the story jumps from 69 years previous, a few days afterwards, to three years afterwards, and includes places and people from the highlands north of Saigon.
Winnie is a young Vietnamese American woman who has arrived in Vietnam from her US home. She is enormously unhappy, lacking self-confidence, and so self-effacing she tries to disappear into the background, even at the international language school at which she teaches, incompetently.
Nine months after her arrival, she disappears. That sets the tone for the chapter headings, all noting time before and after ‘the disappearance’.
I found I had to let go of reality and go with the flow of supernatural events and persona, such as the man who had been the subject of an extortion attempt by three rapscallion children in a cemetery north of Saigon, responding with an extraordinary act. Interlinked are incidents of people and even dogs possessed by mysterious entities, always involving smoke. There is a fortune teller, an earlier lost girl, incest, violent death and a two-headed cobra. A rubber plantation is no refuge as it is attended by multiple cobras; watched by an elderly bedridden woman miles away who allows her eyes to roam away from her body, but she too is linked to others.
It is best not to question, not to take any pragmatic stance, just let the story wash over you. Like eating a rich dessert, this story stays with the reader for hours afterwards.
Reviewed by Jennifer Somerville
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Violet Kupersmith is the author of the short story collection The Frangipani Hotel. She previously taught English with the Fulbright programme in the Mekong Delta, and was a creative writing fellow at the University of East Anglia. She has lived in Da Lat and Saigon, and is currently based in the United States.
Her first novel, Build Your House Around My Body, was a Orders | Grantham Book Services Finalist for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize in 2021.
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