Build Your House Around My Body by Violet Kupersmith

The fates of these two women are inescapably linked, bound together by past generations, by ghosts and ancestors, by the history of possessed bodies and possessed lands. And both will have their revenge.ġ986 The teenage daughter of a wealthy Vietnamese family loses her way in an abandoned rubber plantation while fleeing her angry father and is forever changed.Ģ011 A young, unhappy Vietnamese American woman disappears from her new home in Saigon without a trace. Two young women go missing decades apart.

In fact, this might be the book’s biggest shortcoming: Kupersmith’s interconnected spheres are complex and intensely visceral at their best, but often confusing in their sheer number and vastness.A century of Vietnam's history and folklore comes to life in this 'brilliant, sweeping epic that swaps spirits and sheds time like snakeskin' (Paul Tremblay, author of A Head Full of Ghosts and Survivor Song). There is no shortage of nuanced story lines that delve into the strange or the spooky in this book.

She combines the two with magical realism to create a sensual world that is familiar yet supernatural, populated with a dense web of time-traveling characters-from the aimless biracial Vietnamese-American expatriate who came to Saigon to teach English to the foreboding fortune teller who performs exorcisms-who each hunt for freedom from their dark histories, both personal and political over the course of a century in Vietnam. To tell this story, Kupersmith, who also wrote the short-story collection The Frangipani Hotel, delves deep into Vietnamese folklore and history. That’s not the case in Build Your House Around My Body, Violet Kupersmith’s haunting historical-fiction novel, where the mysterious but linked disappearances of two young women, 25 years apart in Vietnam, set the stage for a tale of vengeance-not only for each of them, but also for their land and their people. Female bodies have long served as metaphor when we talk about colonization, often standing in for land or the body politic, but rarely are they given the space to seek retribution for the oppressive horrors inflicted on them.

Build Your House Around My Body by Violet Kupersmith