E-reading Build your house around my body

Name of Book: Build Your House Around My Body

Author: Violet Kupersmith 

ISBN: B08KSV85QZ

Publisher: Random house 

Type of book: Vietnam, 1900s-2010s, identity, drifting, supernatural, spirit, revenge, history, women, snakes, animals, teaching, punishment, body functions 

Year it was published: 2021

Summary:

A century of Vietnam's history and folklore comes to life in this "brilliant, sweeping epic that swaps spirits and sheds time like snakeskin" (Paul Tremblay, author of A Head Full of Ghosts and Survivor Song).

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.

Part puzzle, part revenge tale, part ghost story, this book 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.

Characters:

Main characters include Ngoan "Winnie" Nguyen  a mixed half vietnamese and half french girl ( father vietnamese and mother french) as well as Binh, an adopted daughter to her aunt and uncle. Of course there is also Augustin, a half Vietnamese half French mixed boy and man whose body makes home to a spirit. Winnie is best described as a millennial stereotype ( a bit like Casey Han from FREE FOOD FOR MILLIONAIRES by Min Jin Lee) who is unhappy and doesn't know what to do with herself. Her other siblings are successful though. She desires to tear herself away from imposed limits. Binh is a boss and a firecracker who is leader of two brothers, both of them having feelings for her, but she desiring to get away and find kindred that can understand her. There are other characters such as the brothers and the plantation owners and so forth. 

Theme:

Supernatural elements can be more freeing than humanity 

Plot:

The story is in third person narrative from what seems to be everyone's point of view. And yes, both minor and major characters have important roles in the story. The timeline is out of order and I honestly don't understand the big picture that the author was trying to show. Perhaps a message to outcasts would be my guess? 

Author Information:

(From goodreads)

Violet Kupersmith is the author of the novel BUILD YOUR HOUSE AROUND MY BODY and the short story collection THE FRANGIPANI HOTEL. She previously taught English with the Fulbright Program in the Mekong Delta and was a creative writing fellow at the University of East Anglia. She has lived in Da Lat and Saigon, Vietnam, and currently resides in the U.S.

Opinion:

In 2014, I had a chance to read the authors collection of short stories, THE FRANGIPANI HOTEL. In particular I was blown away by the stylistic differences in each story, and how each tale had a distinct voice. At the same time, THE FRANGIPANI HOTEL showcased  contemporary life in Vietnam. In BUILD YOUR HOUSE AROUND MY BODY, Violet Kupersmith returns to contemporary Vietnam, and just like in her short stories, she mixed supernatural and contemporary. If I am to compare the two, the novel reads a lot like Mia story in THE FRANGIPANI HOTEL. Yet, the novel is a loose collection of vignettes where there is a sense of missing puzzles and unexplained relationships. Also the timeline is pretty much out of order, with one chapter taking place seventy years before the disappearance, the next ten years before disappearance and next maybe few months disappearance. There is pretty much LITTLE rhyme or reason for why it's structured like this. 

This was given for review 

4 out of 5
(0: Stay away unless a masochist 1: Good for insomnia 2: Horrible but readable; 3: Readable and quickly forgettable, 4: Good, enjoyable 5: Buy it, keep it and never let it go.)