Elevator in Sài Gòn

Starred review from May 6, 2024
A Vietnamese woman becomes an amateur sleuth after her mother’s accidental death in the intriguing latest from Thuân (Chinatown). The unnamed 30-year-old narrator, a single mother, teaches Vietnamese language classes in Paris and is occasionally mistaken for her mixed-race son’s nanny. After her mother dies in a mysterious accident at her brother’s house in Saigon, she returns to Vietnam for the funeral. There, she finds an old notebook of her mother’s containing a yellowed photo of a Parisian man named Paul Polotsky. Soon after, she learns from another man that her mother knew Polotsky when she was a political prisoner during the Vietnam War. That information dredges up memories of a fight she remembers her parents having about her mother’s mysteriously quick release from prison. Back in Paris, the narrator searches for Polotsky, hoping to uncover the truth of her mother’s past. Thuân draws ingeniously on the pacing and tropes of detective fiction to craft a layered tale of family secrets. Readers will be rapt.

June 1, 2024
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 S�i G�n or in Paris, a Hanoian voice that belongs to a Hanoian who has been away from H� 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.

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May 16, 2024
Prize-winning Vietnamese French writer Thuận and lauded translator Nguyễn collaborate again, after Chinatown (2022), for another enigmatic, elliptical journey across borders, decades, generations. Two siblings--the Paris-dwelling protagonist and her S�i G�n-based older brother Mai--have not spoken to each other in 15 years. Death reunites them: their mother, while visiting Mai's luxurious home, fatally falls down the shaft of Vietnam's first-ever private-home elevator. The young woman finds her mother's hidden notebook, in which she discovers an aging photo of "a young white man, with dark hair and ever-so limpid eyes." On the back is his name and address back in Paris. Her search for this stranger becomes the leitmotif to potentially understanding her estranged family: her mother's own Parisian experience, her parents' estrangement, her father and brother's cleaving, her own emigration and (single) motherhood. Thuận deftly amalgamates convoluted family dynamics, political and colonial history, immigration challenges, and identity interrogations--while "ransack[ing] the phone books of Paris and the twenty-four regions of France""--to realize more unknowing, not-knowing, and can't-know than definitive truths. No matter: literary rewards await.

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