Elevator in Sài Gòn

by Thuân, Nguyen An Lý (Translator)

Overview

Personal and political, tragic and bitingly satirical, an ethereal journey through Hanoi, Saigon, Paris, Pyongyang, and Seoul.

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, including what was rumored to be the first elevator in a private home in the country, but days after moving in, 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 learns of an enigmatic figure, Paul Polotsky, from her mother’s notebook. Like an amateur sleuth, she trails Polotsky through the streets of Paris. Meanwhile, she tries to find clues about her mother’s past, which zigzags through Hà Nội, Sài Gòn, Paris, Pyongyang, and Seoul. Combining elements of the detective thriller, a historical romance, and the immigrant experience, Elevator in Sài Gòn is a scathing satire of life in a communist state and a heartbreaking postcolonial ghost story. 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811238540
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	10/01/2024
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Thuân (Ðoan Ánh Thuân) was born in 1967 in Hanoi. She studied at universities in Russia and France and now lives in Paris. She is a recipient of the Writers’ Union Prize, the highest award in Vietnamese literature.

Nguyen An Lý lives in Vietnam and co-edits the online, independent, open-access Zzz Review. Her translations, mostly from English into Vietnamese, include works by authors such as Margaret Atwood, Kazuo Ishiguro, George Orwell, and Amos Oz.

Editorial Reviews

"Like Duras, Thuan is an intensely poetic writer. In many writers’ hands, this strategy could be deadening, but Thuan excels at creating momentum through language, and Nguyen An Lý translates that momentum beautifully. Chinatown exerts a near-tidal pull on the reader. I swallowed it down in one gulp."

NPR - Lily Meyer

"Chinatown is a fever dream, a hallucination, a loop in time and life that Thua^n 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

"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)

"Elevator in Sài Gòn is a literal and structural exquisite corpse, capturing Vietnam's eventful period from 1954 to 2004. Mimicking an elevator's movement, the novel heightens our yearning for romance and mystery, while unflinchingly exposing such narrative shaft. Channeling Marguerite Duras and Patrick Modiano, the book also offers a dead-on tour of a society cunningly leaping from one ideological mode to the next. As if challenging Rick's parting words to Ilsa in Casablanca, Thuân's sophomore novel in English implies that geopolitical debacles might have been mitigated if personal relations were held in more elevated regard than ‘a hill of beans'.

"— Thúy Ðinh NPR

"There is a vertiginous, far-sighted quality to the prose… In Elevator in Sài Gòn, there are no resolutions, only points of departure."— Jasmine Liu The Believer

"Thu?n is a clear-eyed chronicler of the French empire and its Vietnamese afterlives: for English-language readers, accustomed as we are to portrayals dominated by the lens of the American-led war, Elevator in Sài Gòn is a thrilling change of orientation."— Mathilde Monpetit The Berliner

"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

"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

"[Chinatown is] a virtuosic stream-of-consciousness mapping of the afterlives of diaspora."— The New Yorker

"Like Duras, Thuân is an intensely poetic writer. In many writers’ hands, this strategy could be deadening, but Thuân excels at creating momentum through language, and Nguyen An Lý translates that momentum beautifully. Chinatown exerts a near-tidal pull on the reader. I swallowed it down in one gulp."— Lily Meyer NPR

"For Elevator in Saigon the truth is less important than the quest itself with its fabric of crossed destinies and intersecting stories. As with Thu?n’s earlier Chinatown, Elevator in Saigon is an incredibly well-orchestrated portrait of a mind trying to making sense of the world."— Rick Henry Asian Review of Books

"In Nguy?n An Lý's impeccable translation, Thu?n intricately layers history and memory with her customary brio, creating a portrait of grief and longing that persists across generations. A fractured, atmospheric novel that lingers in the mind long after you turn the last page."— Jeremy Tiang

"Underneath its calm surface, Elevator in Sài Gòn is a detective thriller, a romance and an interrogation of post-colonial freedom — a beautiful novel about the collision of personal and public histories."— Tash Aw

""Threaded with observations about the nature of Vietnam’s colonial history and its aftermath, the novel is also an appraisal of memory and elision.""— The New Yorker

From the Publisher

2024-05-04
A chance discovery after a mother’s tragic death propels a daughter on a search from Saigon to Paris in this novel, banned in her native Vietnam, by award-winning author Thuận.

Our narrator lives an expatriate’s life in Paris with her young son, giving Vietnamese language lessons to get by. Meanwhile, in Saigon, her older brother makes a fortune building luxury apartments; it’s been 15 years since she last saw him. When their mother dies in a freak accident connected to the unveiling of a new attraction, she’s forced to return to Saigon. There she finds an old photograph of a young white man carefully stitched inside her mother’s pillow. All her life, her mother seemed a model Communist Party member. “Mrs. Socialist New Wife, performed for twenty years opposite my father, was perhaps my mother’s most iconic role.” Who was she, really, our narrator wants to know. What happened in her youth? What follows is a sometimes hapless wild-goose chase imbued with a poetic imagination, a critique of Communist rule, and more questions than can be answered. Why was her mother locked in an infamous prison at age 19? What was the relationship between her and the white man in the photograph? What lay behind the facade of “Mrs. Deputy Secretary of the Party Committee” and “Mrs. Vice Head of the Local Civil Unit”? Thuận writes at times with sly humor: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that in Vietnam your local police have better and more detailed knowledge about your life than you do yourself.” She 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 Nội for at least half a century.” Her themes of identity and estrangement unfold within a series of mysteries, like a set of Matryoshka dolls.

At its heart, a book about the weight of the past and the unknowability of others, even the ones we love.

Kirkus Reviews