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Build Your House Around My Body: A Novel
Part puzzle, part revenge tale, part ghost story, this ingenious novel spins half a century of Vietnamese history and folklore into "a thrilling read, acrobatic and filled with verve" (The New York Times).
FINALIST FOR THE CENTER FOR FICTION'S FIRST NOVEL PRIZE • LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, NPR, Good Housekeeping, and Kirkus Reviews • "Fiction as daring and accomplished as Violet Kupersmith's first novel reignites my love of the form and its kaleidoscopic possibilities."-David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas
Two young women go missing decades apart. Both are fearless, both are lost. And both will have their revenge.
1986: 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.
2011: A young, unhappy Vietnamese American woman disappears from her new home in Saigon without a trace.
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. Alongside them, we meet a young boy who is sent to a boarding school for the métis children of French expatriates, just before Vietnam declares its independence from colonial rule; two Frenchmen who are trying to start a business with the Vietnam War on the horizon; and the employees of the Saigon Spirit Eradication Co., who find themselves investigating strange occurrences in a farmhouse on the edge of a forest. Each new character and timeline brings us one step closer to understanding what binds them all.
Build Your House Around My Body takes us from colonial mansions to ramshackle zoos, from sweaty nightclubs to the jostling seats of motorbikes, from ex-pat flats to sizzling back-alley street carts. Spanning more than fifty years of Vietnamese history and barreling toward an unforgettable conclusion, this is a time-traveling, heart-pounding, border-crossing fever dream of a novel that will haunt you long after the last page.
FINALIST FOR THE CENTER FOR FICTION'S FIRST NOVEL PRIZE • LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, NPR, Good Housekeeping, and Kirkus Reviews • "Fiction as daring and accomplished as Violet Kupersmith's first novel reignites my love of the form and its kaleidoscopic possibilities."-David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas
Two young women go missing decades apart. Both are fearless, both are lost. And both will have their revenge.
1986: 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.
2011: A young, unhappy Vietnamese American woman disappears from her new home in Saigon without a trace.
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. Alongside them, we meet a young boy who is sent to a boarding school for the métis children of French expatriates, just before Vietnam declares its independence from colonial rule; two Frenchmen who are trying to start a business with the Vietnam War on the horizon; and the employees of the Saigon Spirit Eradication Co., who find themselves investigating strange occurrences in a farmhouse on the edge of a forest. Each new character and timeline brings us one step closer to understanding what binds them all.
Build Your House Around My Body takes us from colonial mansions to ramshackle zoos, from sweaty nightclubs to the jostling seats of motorbikes, from ex-pat flats to sizzling back-alley street carts. Spanning more than fifty years of Vietnamese history and barreling toward an unforgettable conclusion, this is a time-traveling, heart-pounding, border-crossing fever dream of a novel that will haunt you long after the last page.
Editorial Reviews
"I loved this epic book-beautiful, brilliant, powerful, and shivery-back-of-the-neck terrifying."-Madeline Miller, author of Circe
"Violet Kupersmith's eerie and electric debut novel . . . followed me into my days, refusing to release me. . . . This is a big, packed novel. Reading it provides a sensation not unlike riding on a motorbike overloaded with passengers and wares: It careens, it tilts and at times I wondered if it would reach its destination without a crash. But Kupersmith proves herself a fearless driver who revels in the daunting challenge she has set for herself. There are so many ways this novel could have lost its balance; instead, its too-much-ness makes for a thrilling read, acrobatic and filled with verve."-The New York Times
"Haunting and unforgettable."-Bust
"A sensual world that is familiar yet supernatural, populated with a dense web of time-traveling characters . . . dexterous, sensitive storytelling."-Time
"A brilliant, sweeping epic that swaps spirits and sheds time like snakeskin, Build Your House Around My Body is a marvel. Thrilling, witty, disturbing, righteous-I won't be able to shut up about how damned awesome this book is. Neither will you."-Paul Tremblay, author of A Head Full of Ghosts and Survivor Song
"A heady, gothic, spellbinder of a book."-Kelly Link, author of Get in Trouble
"This impressively constructed weave of stories, haunted by the ghosts of history and family, is gorgeous, completely original, and quite disturbing-usually all at the same time. Beware! This book might swallow you up."-Karen Joy Fowler, author of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves
"This lush, sultry phantasmagoria of a novel is as playful, hypnotic, and bone-chilling as a cobra rising to strike."-Elisabeth Thomas, author of Catherine House
"Violet Kupe...
"Violet Kupersmith's eerie and electric debut novel . . . followed me into my days, refusing to release me. . . . This is a big, packed novel. Reading it provides a sensation not unlike riding on a motorbike overloaded with passengers and wares: It careens, it tilts and at times I wondered if it would reach its destination without a crash. But Kupersmith proves herself a fearless driver who revels in the daunting challenge she has set for herself. There are so many ways this novel could have lost its balance; instead, its too-much-ness makes for a thrilling read, acrobatic and filled with verve."-The New York Times
"Haunting and unforgettable."-Bust
"A sensual world that is familiar yet supernatural, populated with a dense web of time-traveling characters . . . dexterous, sensitive storytelling."-Time
"A brilliant, sweeping epic that swaps spirits and sheds time like snakeskin, Build Your House Around My Body is a marvel. Thrilling, witty, disturbing, righteous-I won't be able to shut up about how damned awesome this book is. Neither will you."-Paul Tremblay, author of A Head Full of Ghosts and Survivor Song
"A heady, gothic, spellbinder of a book."-Kelly Link, author of Get in Trouble
"This impressively constructed weave of stories, haunted by the ghosts of history and family, is gorgeous, completely original, and quite disturbing-usually all at the same time. Beware! This book might swallow you up."-Karen Joy Fowler, author of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves
"This lush, sultry phantasmagoria of a novel is as playful, hypnotic, and bone-chilling as a cobra rising to strike."-Elisabeth Thomas, author of Catherine House
"Violet Kupe...
Readers Top Reviews
alexx RoblesGreg Mer
I thought this book was really unique. It took a while for me to get into it but once I started going I loved how all the stories connected. I highly suggest it! It wasn't too scary but did give me the chills here and there!
Dorothy Winsor
I admired the way the author pieced this book together, jumping around in time and using different points of view. For me, solving the puzzle of what was happening was one of the two major satisfactions this book provided. The other was the use of Vietnamese myth, setting, and history. When I got to the end, I did find myself wondering if the puzzle had been worth solving. I missed the emotional satisfaction I like in fiction.
CascadianaJ.T. Brook
My rating of 3 is an average of the quality of writing (4) and my reading pleasure (2). The writing was very descriptively elegant - but a lot of that description was about people vomiting. Honestly, I've never read a book where so many characters barfed so much - whether it was from drinking, food poisoning, motion sickness, or something else. Most of the books I've been reading these days seem to have chapters flashing back and forth among characters and historical periods, and several others have had characters flipping from inhabiting one body to another. Maybe those are leitmotifs for our times - we all want to be somebody else in some other time. I have long wanted to visit Vietnam, but after this book, I'm not so sure - there was very little enticing about the country here. And it's hard to see how a book that encapsulates many eras in Vietnam's complicated history and features a Vietnamese-American woman as one of the two main characters (or maybe there's just one main character?) can completely ignore the Vietnam War period. All in all, a puzzling book, not my favorite, but different.
Susan Mills
This is a masterful novel. The language is riveting, the feeling throughout is haunting, the settings are wonderfully drawn. I tend to be drawn to books of atmosphere and excellent writing, and this book met these criteria in high style. Kupersmith’s writing includes exquisite details, creative language, perfect observations. Weather, landscape, various neighborhoods and places, a rubber tree forest of snakes, Saigon coffee houses and karaoke bars, a cemetery – all are vividly, sensually described. And much more so than the characters, who are more symbols than fleshed out humans (or ghosts). With so much raw misery and ugliness, it is hard to feel drawn to anyone. Vietnam is very much a character in the story. The effects of colonialism, the violent exploitation of the body, the melding of French, American and Vietnamese. Beyond the country, there are a cast of characters, not always easy to remember in their fascinating detail. Themes of the book include the body and its violations, revenge, trauma, sense of one’s self. It’s all held together with folklore, the supernatural. What was harder for me about the book was the abject nature of just about everything. This is a book that is so complex, with so much going on, that it begs for a second reading, yet the thought of doing so makes me slightly nauseous. Nothing is happy or optimistic or beautiful here. The police are lazy and corrupt, dogs are starving and apt to be scooped up and sold for meat, women are abused, excrement and bodily fluids are everywhere, the culture involves a lot of alcohol and karaoke, people wallow in self-abuse, and even the ghosts have suffered and inflict suffering. Snakes and smoke monsters, people turning their bodies inside-out—none of it feels pleasant. Beyond the halfway point of the novel, I began to wonder if it wasn’t a novel at all but a series of short stories. There are so many separate sections of vastly different time periods and character groupings, which never seemed to come together. They do come together by the end to make up what is definitely a cohesive novel, though I have to wonder if there weren’t a number of suspenseful threads that never get tied up. (This is where the second reading would come in handy.) However, while I often dislike novels that skip to a different character or time period when it interrupts the flow or prevents the reader from getting in deeper with a character, that is definitely not the case here. The transitions add to the complexity; they completely work with the theme, evolving thoughtfully. This is a writer to watch for in future books. I can hardly believe this is a debut novel. The interweaving of the real and the supernatural is simply brilliant and fascinating. I only wish I could bring myself to read it a second time…
Alix
As someone who is part Vietnamese I was excited to dig into Build Your House Around My Body and learn more about Vietnamese culture and mythology. This book is a puzzle with many different characters and plot lines. Eventually these disparate storylines converge into one solid picture. Spirits and memory play a large part in this story. I found all of the different characters and storylines to be interesting but Binh was by far my favorite character. She is a fiery character who is fearless and out for revenge. The majority of men in this book are rather unlikable or pathetic apart from the Fortune Teller. This book can be sad and wistful at times but overall I was satisfied with how everything concluded. Minus a star because it is slow throughout. If you’re looking for something fast paced and thrilling, this is not it. Rather, this a slow burn puzzle of a mystery combining Vietnamese mythology and folklore. It’s a fascinating read and I look forward to reading Kupersmith’s future work.
Short Excerpt Teaser
June 2010, Saigon, nine months before Winnie's disappearance
Something was moving in the shrubs in front of Tan Son Nhat Airport. It was one in the morning, and Winnie had stepped off a plane twenty minutes ago. Her connecting flight had been held up by a summer thunderstorm in Hong Kong and now her plans were all awry from the start.
Leaving the air-conditioning of the baggage claim, she had felt her edges soften immediately in the humidity. The yellow-uniformed taxi drivers, like half-spilled yolks in their cracked-open car doors, stretched out their necks in unison as they followed the movements of the new passengers exiting the airport. Winnie had seen one of them stare at her, and when she accidentally returned his eye contact he opened his mouth to call out before abruptly closing it again, and Winnie knew he was debating whether to use Vietnamese or English on her. She'd turned and started walking away from the taxi queue before she could hear his final verdict.
And now she was standing in the dark, on the shorn grass of the small, half-neglected greenery by the motorbike parking lot, watching the leaves on this low bush quivering strangely. Just one bush-the rest of the shrubbery was still, and there was no discernible wind that could be responsible for the shaking. She contemplated finding something to prod it with, wondering what would come out if she did, wondering what she should do now.
Winnie leaned on the handle of her suitcase. She was supposed to be staying at the house of a great-aunt she'd never met before but doubted that the old woman was up at this hour or would appreciate Winnie arriving at her home in the middle of the night. All Winnie had been told about the great-aunt was that she was a former nun, was still deeply devout and, if she missed her five a.m. mass, deeply irritable.
Her curiosity had gotten the better of her: Winnie took a step toward the rustling shrub and bent over to pull back a branch and peer inside. But before her hand could make contact with it, she heard a sudden, low hiss from somewhere within the leafy shadows, a sound like an angry radiator. Winnie jerked away. It could have just been a jet-lagged auditory hallucination, but if it was not, it would be better if she and whatever was inside the bush remained strangers to each other. Winnie quickly turned and began dragging her suitcase toward the smeary yellow streetlights of Tan Binh.
The farther she got from the airport the cheaper the hotels would be, so she planned to walk for at least ten blocks. Whenever she passed a hotel that still had lights on, she would look into its lobby and see how big its couches were in order to determine whether or not it was too expensive. The pay-by-the-hour sex motel was fully illuminated and conspicuously couchless, but it had a yawning motorbike guard sitting on a stool and a woman with her hair set in pink rollers behind a desk and a large, glass-paned refrigerator full of beer. Winnie didn't see the sign advertising an hourly rate or the condoms for sale next to bags of beef jerky on top of the fridge until she was already halfway through the door and the woman in curlers raised an eyebrow at her. But when she hastily calculated that it would cost her less than five dollars to have a room until six in the morning, she decided to stay. She would have plenty of cash left over for the taxi to her great-aunt's house, and she would arrive right as the old woman was returning from church.
The receptionist took Winnie's passport, gave her a room key, and sold her an overpriced can of 333 from the beer fridge and a bag of jerky. The motorbike guard took the handle of her suitcase, about to offer to carry it up the stairs for her, but when he realized how little it actually weighed, he returned it unchivalrously to Winnie.
The polycarbonate clamshell thumped hollowly against the stairs as Winnie dragged it behind her one-handed. Buying a suitcase so large now seemed like an overconfident gamble she had made back in America. She had assumed that one day she would fill all of this space. That her life here would provide things worth keeping. That she herself would become someone worthy of being kept. But now she feared that she had jinxed herself. Her arrogance had earned her the ire of a fickle god, and her life would continue to be as empty as her luggage, wherever she went. Winnie was twenty-two. She had brought with her a passport, two sets of clean clothes, and her own flesh. All the rest she would acquire.
The key opened a windowless room that smelled like dried sweat. Its walls and floor tiles were the color of the inside of a lip, and there was a large mirror mounted on the ceiling above the bed. The wheeled suitcase d...
Something was moving in the shrubs in front of Tan Son Nhat Airport. It was one in the morning, and Winnie had stepped off a plane twenty minutes ago. Her connecting flight had been held up by a summer thunderstorm in Hong Kong and now her plans were all awry from the start.
Leaving the air-conditioning of the baggage claim, she had felt her edges soften immediately in the humidity. The yellow-uniformed taxi drivers, like half-spilled yolks in their cracked-open car doors, stretched out their necks in unison as they followed the movements of the new passengers exiting the airport. Winnie had seen one of them stare at her, and when she accidentally returned his eye contact he opened his mouth to call out before abruptly closing it again, and Winnie knew he was debating whether to use Vietnamese or English on her. She'd turned and started walking away from the taxi queue before she could hear his final verdict.
And now she was standing in the dark, on the shorn grass of the small, half-neglected greenery by the motorbike parking lot, watching the leaves on this low bush quivering strangely. Just one bush-the rest of the shrubbery was still, and there was no discernible wind that could be responsible for the shaking. She contemplated finding something to prod it with, wondering what would come out if she did, wondering what she should do now.
Winnie leaned on the handle of her suitcase. She was supposed to be staying at the house of a great-aunt she'd never met before but doubted that the old woman was up at this hour or would appreciate Winnie arriving at her home in the middle of the night. All Winnie had been told about the great-aunt was that she was a former nun, was still deeply devout and, if she missed her five a.m. mass, deeply irritable.
Her curiosity had gotten the better of her: Winnie took a step toward the rustling shrub and bent over to pull back a branch and peer inside. But before her hand could make contact with it, she heard a sudden, low hiss from somewhere within the leafy shadows, a sound like an angry radiator. Winnie jerked away. It could have just been a jet-lagged auditory hallucination, but if it was not, it would be better if she and whatever was inside the bush remained strangers to each other. Winnie quickly turned and began dragging her suitcase toward the smeary yellow streetlights of Tan Binh.
The farther she got from the airport the cheaper the hotels would be, so she planned to walk for at least ten blocks. Whenever she passed a hotel that still had lights on, she would look into its lobby and see how big its couches were in order to determine whether or not it was too expensive. The pay-by-the-hour sex motel was fully illuminated and conspicuously couchless, but it had a yawning motorbike guard sitting on a stool and a woman with her hair set in pink rollers behind a desk and a large, glass-paned refrigerator full of beer. Winnie didn't see the sign advertising an hourly rate or the condoms for sale next to bags of beef jerky on top of the fridge until she was already halfway through the door and the woman in curlers raised an eyebrow at her. But when she hastily calculated that it would cost her less than five dollars to have a room until six in the morning, she decided to stay. She would have plenty of cash left over for the taxi to her great-aunt's house, and she would arrive right as the old woman was returning from church.
The receptionist took Winnie's passport, gave her a room key, and sold her an overpriced can of 333 from the beer fridge and a bag of jerky. The motorbike guard took the handle of her suitcase, about to offer to carry it up the stairs for her, but when he realized how little it actually weighed, he returned it unchivalrously to Winnie.
The polycarbonate clamshell thumped hollowly against the stairs as Winnie dragged it behind her one-handed. Buying a suitcase so large now seemed like an overconfident gamble she had made back in America. She had assumed that one day she would fill all of this space. That her life here would provide things worth keeping. That she herself would become someone worthy of being kept. But now she feared that she had jinxed herself. Her arrogance had earned her the ire of a fickle god, and her life would continue to be as empty as her luggage, wherever she went. Winnie was twenty-two. She had brought with her a passport, two sets of clean clothes, and her own flesh. All the rest she would acquire.
The key opened a windowless room that smelled like dried sweat. Its walls and floor tiles were the color of the inside of a lip, and there was a large mirror mounted on the ceiling above the bed. The wheeled suitcase d...
