Elevator in Sài Gòn (translation by Nguyen An Ly)

“Thuận’s prose, at once expansive and claustrophobic, haunts without weighing the reader down. Across Hanoi, Saigon, Paris, Pyongyang, and Seoul, our narrator attempts to force a sense of clarity into her past, but colonialism blurs history and scripts the very fabric of existence, trapping our narrator in a seemingly endless search. Thrilling, tragic, and at times hilarious, Elevator in Sài Gòn is a postcolonial ghost story, a political satire, and a romance that will linger in the psyche long after the final descent of the elevator.” ―Sheung-King, author of You Are Eating an Orange. You Are Naked. and Batshit Seven

A Vietnamese woman living in Paris travels back to Sài Gòn for her estranged mother’s funeral. Her brother had recently built a new house and staged a grotesquely lavish ceremony for their mother to inaugurate what was rumoured 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 dies after mysteriously falling down the elevator shaft. Following 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 Vietnam – trying to find clues to the spiralling, deepening questions her mother left behind unanswered – and perhaps unanswerable.

Product description

Elevator in Saì Gòn 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, Thuận'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." ― Thúy Đinh (editor-at-large at Asymptote, coeditor at Da Màu Magazine, freelance critic, and literary translator)

--Thúy Đinh ― NPR

Thuận was born in 1967 in Hanoi. She studied at Pyatigorsk University (Russia) and at la Sorbonne in Paris. She is the author of ten novels and a recipient of the Writers’ Union Prize, the highest award in Vietnamese literature. 7 of her novels were translated and published in France. Chinatown, her debut novel in English, won a PEN Translates Award, the 2023 ALTA National Translation Award, is the Runner-Up for TA First Translation Prize 2023, and was shortlisted for the 2023 Republic of Consciousness Prize. She currently lives in Paris.

NGUYỄN AN LÝ lives in Hochiminh City. She has over 20 translations into Vietnamese, published under various names and in various genres, including authors such as Margaret Atwood, Donna Tartt, Kazuo Ishiguro, Richard Flanagan, J. L. Borges, and the poetry in The Lord of the Rings. As an editor, she has worked on translations from Nabokov, A. S. Byatt, Roland Barthes, Joseph Campbell, Viet Thanh Nguyen and Liu Cixin, among others. Chinatown by Thuận, her debut translation into English, won an English PEN Translates Award and the 2023 ALTA National Translation Award in Prose. She co-founds and co-edits the independent online Zzz Review.