She exists in a state of squalor, both internally and externally, reflecting the condition of Saigon’s noisome open-air markets, sleazy sex motels and creepy karaoke bars and beer joints. But Winnie just can’t make her life work. When she is told that good Vietnamese girls don’t drink coffee, she never touches it again. It’s as if the workings of the cosmos depend on the fate of this messed up, seemingly insignificant young woman.Īnd how messed up she is, despite her longing to be good. Every chapter heading refers to her vanishing one chapter is set 62 years before her disappearance, while another’s events occur the day after. On its surface, Build Your House Around My Body concerns Winnie Nguyen, a Vietnamese American woman who’s come to Vietnam to teach and to find herself. Add in two-headed cobras, hungry ghosts, body-hopping and body horror (both the more ordinary kind that involves explosive emesis and incontinence, and the kind that involves eldritch distortions), then throw in Vietnam’s history as a chew toy of empires, and you have a small part of what goes on in this kaleidoscopic book. Remember the smoke monster from “Lost”? It appears that he’s alive and well and living in Violet Kupersmith’s debut novel, Build Your House Around My Body.
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