After years of living in Paris, a Vietnamese woman attends her mother’s funeral in Sài Gòn. Her older brother, who has become extravagantly wealthy, has installed an elevator in his home – apparently, the first home with an elevator in all of Vietnam. Following a lavish party thrown to celebrate the elevator, their mother falls down the shaft and dies. The daughter finds her mother’s notebook, sewn into her pillow, and begins to investigate a figure from her revolutionary past: a man named Paul Polotsky, who lived in Paris in the 1950s. Back in Paris, she manages to track him down and begins to follow him, her life narrowing on this sole focus. What, exactly, was the relationship between her mother and Polotsky? Why did her mother carry a fifty-year-old photograph of him? What secrets did her mother take to the grave?
Why did her mother carry a fifty-year-old photograph of him? What secrets did her mother take to the grave?
Thuận’s exhilarating take on detective fiction, inflected by the inescapability of Vietnam’s colonial history, is innovative and ambitious. A deceptively simple premise – a noir-esque mystery – gives way to a complex exploration of the silences and gaps imposed by Vietnam’s difficult history. The narrator frequently imagines vivid scenarios to compensate for what she cannot possibly know. But, despite her persistence, again and again she encounters barriers – erasures in the historical record, deliberate obfuscations on her mother’s part, competing accounts of her own family’s history. She comes to realize that her mother, once a respected Party member without undesirable ties to the capitalist South, hid much of her past, that the official story is incomplete. In the present, her family becomes a sort of abbreviated stand-in for the complexities of postcolonial Vietnam. The upstanding Socialist mother, once the recipient of a prestigious fellowship in Paris, dies in the lap of luxury, having raised a hyper-capitalist son. The daughter lives in the colonizers’ capital, haunted by her home country’s past. In Thuận’s figuring of Paris, it is a hub of immigrants, France’s colonial history never far from the forefront as the narrator zigzags across the city in search of Polotsky.
A deceptively simple premise – a noir-esque mystery – gives way to a complex exploration of the silences and gaps imposed by Vietnam’s difficult history. The narrator frequently imagines vivid scenarios to compensate for what she cannot possibly know.
In controlled, precise prose – beautifully translated by Nguyễn An Lý – Thuận displays a remarkable talent for storytelling. The structure of the novel, moving back and forth like an elevator, insists on history’s relevance to the present. The narrator is stuck in the past, investigating a figure her mother encountered half a century ago, and returning in her thoughts to her own family’s history even as she pushes forward with her investigation. The achronological structure gives the novel a cyclical feel, suggesting that Vietnam’s colonial past is not far away. The novel is part propulsive mystery, part commentary on Vietnam’s postcolonial situation, part reckoning with historical silence, and fully realized in all its constituent parts.
The structure of the novel, moving back and forth like an elevator, insists on history’s relevance to the present.
THUẬN was born in 1967 in Hanoi. She studied at Pyatigorsk State University (Russia) and at the Sorbonne in Paris. She is the author of ten novels and a recipient of the Writers’ Union Prize, the highest award in Vietnamese literature. Seven of her novels were translated into French and published in France. Chinatown, her debut novel in English, won a PEN Translates Award, and was shortlisted for the 2023 Republic of Consciousness Prize. She currently lives in Paris.
NGUYỄN AN LÝ lives in Ho Chi Minh City. She has over twenty translations into Vietnamese, published under various names and in various genres, including authors such as Margaret Atwood, Donna Tartt, Kazuo Ishiguro, Richard Flanagan, Jorge Luis Borges, and the poetry in The Lord of the Rings. As an editor, she has worked on translations from Nabokov, A. S. Byatt, Roland Barthes, Joseph Campbell, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and Liu Cixin, among others. Chinatown by Thuận, her debut translation into English, won the 2023 ALTA National Translation Award in Prose. She co-founded and co-edits the independent online journal Zzz Review.
Publisher: Book*hug Press (July 9, 2024)
Paperback 5.25″ x 8″ | 206 pages
ISBN: 9781771668996
Clementine Oberst is a Ph.D. candidate specializing in television studies. Born and raised in Toronto, she has lived in Montreal and Glasgow and now calls Hamilton home. When she isn't writing her dissertation, Clementine can be found knitting, trying to cultivate a green thumb, and playing with her cats. She loves nothing more than losing herself in a good book. You can connect with her on Instagram @clementinereads.
