Right from the get-go, she experiences unsettling and slightly unhinged encounters with others, but it’s unclear if these encounters are actually unhinged, or if it’s simply Winnie’s perception of these encounters. As she starts to put less and less effort into her job, she begins to unravel and ultimately wants to disappear from her own body.
She feels disaffected with her teaching job and can’t connect with her co-workers, whom she finds mildly annoying and sometimes flabbergasting. She’s living with a distant family member who is judgmental, alienating Winnie in her own home. The story has several storylines that are all interconnected, but our main character is Winnie, a Vietnamese American woman who takes a job teaching English in Vietnam. No, I will not stop recommending this book to my friends. I loved the story so much that I automatically purchased a physical copy after finishing the audiobook.
Build Your House Around My Body took me on a wildly engaging and sometimes nauseating journey full of ghosts, snakes, and subtle horror. I just knew I loved this book’s cover and the synopsis sounded intriguing. I picked this book on a whim while browsing the LA County Library audiobook catalog. It is a brilliant, symbolic exploration of colonialism, generational trauma, women’s bodies, and the history of place. 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.Build Your House Around My Body by Violet Kupersmith is one of the best books I’ve read in recent years.
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.
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