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, and staged a grotesquely lavish ceremony for their mother to inaugurate what was rumored to be the first elevator in a private home in the country. But shortly after the ceremony, in the middle of the night, 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 begins to investigate and track an enigmatic figure, Paul Polotsky, who emerges from her mother's notebook. Like an amateur sleuth, she trails Polotsky through the streets of Paris, sneaking behind him as he goes about his usual routines; meanwhile, she researches her mother's past--zigzagging across France and Asia--trying to find clues to the spiraling, deepening questions her mother left behind unanswered--and perhaps unanswerable.
Still banned in Vietnam, Elevator in S i G n is a thrilling novel combining elements of the detective thriller, historical romance, postcolonial ghost story, and a biting satire of life in a communist state.
Industry Reviews
"Thuan 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 Sai Gon 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, Thuan'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'.
" -- Thuy ?inh - NPR
"Thuan has a sharp eye for detail, describing 'a Hanoian voice of the kind that could now rarely be heard, and only in Sai Gon or in Paris, a Hanoian voice that belongs to a Hanoian who has been away from Ha 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 Thuan 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, 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 Ly translates that momentum beautifully. Chinatown exerts a near-tidal pull on the reader. I swallowed it down in one gulp." -- Lily Meyer - NPR
