On the rainiest night of the year, an elderly woman plummets to her death down the shaft of Saigon’s first-ever residential elevator; her son, a wealthy real estate mogul, reacts by staging an elaborate funeral inspired by Kim Jong-il. Soon afterwards, her daughter – a Vietnamese teacher in France – finds a mysterious clue in her mother’s journal, a photograph captioned “Paul Polotsky, 1954, 21 avenue de Suffren, Paris”.
Our narrator investigates. Was her mother not the devoted Party apparatchik she always believed her to be? Had she survived the horrors of Hòa Lò Prison because this mysterious French-Russian emigré fell in love with her? Is Polotsky really the adulterous old man she’s been following around Paris? Thuận is a clear-eyed chronicler of the French empire and its Vietnamese afterlives: for English-language readers, accustomed as we are to portrayals dominated by the lens of the American-led war, Elevator in Sài Gòn is a thrilling change of orientation.
- Available August 6 from New Directions Publishing.
