Thuận deftly amalgamates convoluted family dynamics, political and colonial history, immigration challenges, and identity interrogations to realize more unknowing, not-knowing, and can’t-know than definitive truths. No matter: literary rewards await.
— Terry Hong, Booklist
Personal and political, tragic and bitingly satirical, an ethereal journey through Hanoi, Saigon, Paris, Pyongyang, and Seoul
A young Vietnamese woman living in Paris travels back to Saigon for her estranged mother’s funeral. Her brother had recently built a new house in Saigon, including what was rumored to be the first elevator in a private home in the country, but days after moving in, their mother mysteriously fell down the elevator shaft, dying in an instant.
After the funeral, the daughter becomes increasingly fascinated with her family’s history and learns of an enigmatic figure, Paul Polotsky, from her mother’s notebook. Like an amateur sleuth, she trails Polotsky through the streets of Paris. Meanwhile, she tries to find clues about her mother’s past, which zigzags through Hà Nội, Sài Gòn, Paris, Pyongyang, and Seoul. Combining elements of the detective thriller, a historical romance, and the immigrant experience, Elevator in Sài Gòn is a scathing satire of life in a communist state and a heartbreaking postcolonial ghost story.
Thuận deftly amalgamates convoluted family dynamics, political and colonial history, immigration challenges, and identity interrogations to realize more unknowing, not-knowing, and can’t-know than definitive truths. No matter: literary rewards await.
— Terry Hong, Booklist
Elevator in Sài 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, NPR
Thuận draws ingeniously on the pacing and tropes of detective fiction to craft a layered tale of family secrets.
— Publishers Weekly (starred review)
There is a vertiginous, far-sighted quality to the prose… In Elevator in Sài Gòn, there are no resolutions, only points of departure.
— Jasmine Liu, The Believer
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.
— Mathilde Monpetit, The Berliner
Thuận has a sharp eye for detail, describing “a Hanoian voice of the kind that could now rarely be heard, and only in Sài Gòn or in Paris, a Hanoian voice that belongs to a Hanoian who has been away from Hà Nội for at least half a century.” Her themes of identity and estrangement unfold within a series of mysteries, like a set of Matryoshka dolls.
— Kirkus Reviews
What begins as a familial drama gradually broadens its scope: By the novel’s end, what began as a story of loss and grief has grown to encompass everything from Cold War drama to an oblique thriller set against a Parisian backdrop.
— Tobias Carroll, Words Without Borders
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 Sài Gòn 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 Sài Gòn is an incredibly well-orchestrated portrait of a mind trying to making sense of the world.
— Rick Henry, Asian Review of Books
Threaded with observations about the nature of Vietnam’s colonial history and its aftermath, the novel is also an appraisal of memory and elision.
