elevator in sài gòn

BY Thuận/ TRANSLATED FROM vietnamese BY nguyễn an lý

Winner, 2024 English PEN Translates Award

A suspenseful novel that is part detective story, historical romance, postcolonial ghost story and a biting satire of life in a communist state.

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.

PRAISE

‘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

‘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.

‘In Nguyễn An Lý's impeccable translation, Thuận intricately layers history and memory with her customary brio, creating a portrait of grief and longing that persists across generations. A fractured, atmospheric novel that lingers in the mind long after you turn the last page.’ — Jeremy Tiang

‘Underneath its calm surface, Elevator in Sài Gòn is a detective thriller, a romance and an interrogation of post-colonial freedom — a beautiful novel about the collision of personal and public histories.’ - Tash Aw

'for Elevator in Saigon the truth is less important than the quest itself with its fabric of crossed destinies and intersecting stories. As with Thuận’s earlier Chinatown, Elevator in Saigon is an incredibly well-orchestrated portrait of a mind trying to making sense of the world.' — Rick Henry, Asian Review of Books

contributors’ details

Thuận grew up first in Hanoi then Saigon. She spent her college years in Soviet Russia before settling in Paris, where she became a novelist. She is the author of Chinatown, translated by Nguyễn An Lý, and has just finished her tenth novel, B-52.

Nguyễn An Lý lives in Hochiminh City. She has over twenty translations into Vietnamese, published under various names and in various genres. 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.

more information

• Publication date: 08 August 2024

• Format: B-format paperback (189mm x 129mm)

• Extent: pp. 208

• Rights held: WEL excl. North America

• ISBNs: 978-1-911284-96-3 (paperback)/978-1-911284-95-6 (ebook)

• Price: £12.99 (paperback); £7.99 (ebook)