There was a tacit agreement between them to never, ever bring up the incident in the graveyard, and to avoid all topics that might possibly lead to it -- the dead, the undead, the pass in nearby Chu Dreh that was haunted by French soldiers, a spirit-possessed neighbor who had spent a full week speaking in tongues and eating nothing but bananas before abruptly returning to normal with no memory of it, the water ghosts of Ea Wy, the disappearance and rescue of the Ma daughter under mysterious circumstances back in the eighties, anything involving funerals.[p. 142]
From the very first page -- with its chapter heading 'June 2010, Saigon, Nine Months Before Winnie’s Disappearance' -- we know that Winnie, a young Vietnamese-American woman visiting Vietnam for the first time, is going to disappear. But how? And why? Winnie (whose 'real' name, Ngoan Nguyen, she barely registers as her own when it's spoken) is something of a slacker: she's not interested in her job teaching English, she's awkward with everyone she encounters, and she seems to want to disappear into the shadows.
Entwined with Winnie's narrative are other stories: Long, the office administrator at the school, who finds Winnie intriguing; Tan, Long's brother, who is a police officer; a man known as the Fortune Teller, who has some disturbing tricks and a complex history; the almost-caricatured Cooks, married Americans who teach at the same school as Winnie and blog incessantly about their Vietnam Adventure... and Binh, the girl who Tan and Long both had a crush on as adolescents, who was known as Bé Lì -- bad girl. 'It was what Binh had always been, and so it was what she had always been called.'
This is a novel which deals with colonialism, with sexism, with racism; with the tourist industry and the importance of speaking English; with bodies, and how to live in them, and who has power over them; with family, and how it can fail a younger or less gifted child. There is humour, which I had not expected to find in a novel concerned with such dark themes. And there is a great deal of Vietnamese folklore -- though that seems a dismissive, and somewhat offensive, term for the supernatural world which is fully present, tangible and influential, and operates with its own internal logic. The story of Winne, and of the other lives that intersect hers, isn't linear, and it's far from predictable. There are ghosts (probably), snakes (definitely), something unsettling in the rubber tree forest, and a small dog with a definite sense of purpose.
Build Your House Around My Body is tremendously atmospheric, and its layers are opaque: I suspect I'll see different aspects of the story when I reread. I liked it very much, and I also admire it as a complex work of fiction.
Fulfils the ‘Any Of The Monthly Picks From The Indulgent Bibliophile Bookclub’ rubric of the Something Bookish Reading Challenge.
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