Description
Description
A young Vietnamese woman living in Paris travels back to Saigon for her estranged mother's funeral. Her brother had recently built a new house in Saigon, and staged a grotesquely lavish ceremony for their mother to inaugurate what was rumored to be the first elevator in a private home in the country. But shortly after the ceremony, in the middle of the night, their mother mysteriously fell down the elevator shaft, dying in an instant.
After the funeral, the daughter becomes increasingly fascinated with her family's history, and begins to investigate and track an enigmatic figure, Paul Polotski, who emerges from her mother's notebook. Like an amateur sleuth, she trails Polotski through the streets of Paris, sneaking behind him as he goes about his usual routines; meanwhile, she researches her mother's past--zigzagging across France and Asia--trying to find clues to the spiraling, deepening questions her mother left behind unanswered--and perhaps unanswerable.
Still banned in Vietnam, Elevator in Saigon is a thrilling novel combining elements of the detective thriller, historical romance, postcolonial ghost story, and a biting satire of life in a communist state.
Critical Reviews
Critical Reviews
--Thúy Ðinh "NPR" [Chinatown is] a virtuosic stream-of-consciousness mapping of the afterlives of diaspora.-- "The New Yorker" Thuân has a sharp eye for detail, describing 'a Hanoian voice of the kind that could now rarely be heard, and only in Sài Gòn or in Paris, a Hanoian voice that belongs to a Hanoian who has been away from Hà Noi for at least half a century.' Her themes of identity and estrangement unfold within a series of mysteries, like a set of Matryoshka dolls.-- "Kirkus Reviews" Thuân draws ingeniously on the pacing and tropes of detective fiction to craft a layered tale of family secrets. Readers will be rapt.-- "Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)" Chinatown is a fever dream, a hallucination, a loop in time and life that Thuân masterfully deploys to capture the disorienting and debilitating effects of migration, racism, and a broken heart in both Vietnam and France. I was completely immersed in this spellbinding novel.--Viet Thanh Nguyen
Publishing Information
Publishing Information
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