"Thuan'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 Sai Gon 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 Sai Gon 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.

New from the English PEN and ALTA National Translation Award winning author and translator of Chinatown.

About the Author

Thuan was born in 1967 in Hanoi. She studied at Pyatigorsk University 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. Chinatown, her debut novel in English, won the 2023 ALTA National Translation Award. She currently lives in Paris.

Nguyen An Ly lives in Hochiminh City. She has over 20 translations into Vietnamese, published under various names and in various genres. Chinatown by Thuan, her debut translation into English, won the 2023 ALTA National Translation Award in Prose. She co-founds and co-edits the independent online Zzz Review

Reviews

Elevator in Sai Gon 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, Thuan'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." - Thuy Dinh (editor-at-large at Asymptote, coeditor at Da Mau Magazine, freelance critic, and literary translator)

-- Thuy Dinh * NPR *

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

-- Rick Henry


Awards
Winner of English PEN Translates Award 2024 (UK).



Book Information
ISBN 9781911284963
Author Thuan
Format Paperback
Imprint Tilted Axis Press
Publisher Tilted Axis Press
Weight(grams) 189g