build your house around my body violet kupersmith

At this point, the chapters range widely beyond Winnie’s present-day story to the days, months, and years before and after her disappearance. Winnie figures out how to placate her students by helping them learn American terms such as “booty call” and “loaded nachos,” and enters a more or less satisfactory romantic relationship with a fellow teacher, but then disappears. Twenty-two-year-old Winnie, a mixed-race American woman, signs up to teach English in Saigon in an attempt to connect with the Vietnamese part of her heritage, and essentially dooms herself to failure: “her life would continue to be as empty as her luggage, wherever she went,” Kupersmith writes. Build Your House Around My Body is an unsettling and powerful work.Kupersmith’s exceptional debut novel (after the collection The Frangipani Hotel) offers profound and original insight on Vietnam’s tortured history. It would have been easy for a book with so much going on to collapse into incoherence, but it’s an engaging read the whole way through.

There are fortunetellers and shape-shifters, pepper and rubber plantation tycoons, and a lady who may or may not be a paraplegic who sells fake lottery tickets.

There are Winnie’s ridiculous fellow teachers at the Achievement! International Language Academy. There’s the gentle and befuddled Long and his estranged brother, Tan, both in love with a combative girl named Binh. Kupersmith’s grasp of her story’s secondary characters is as firm as her grasp of Winnie.

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.

Build your house around my body violet kupersmith