Build Your House Around My Body-Review

 This book has been on my 2024 hopefuls and when I was putting down my online Waterstones order for another book, I decided to get ‘Build Your House Around My Body’ as well. I have read a synopsis and it was the spatial setting of Vietnam that made him read this novel. Although it is not a particularly long book, I took a long time to read it and even longer to gather my thoughts around it.

The novel seemingly follows two stories- a modern story of an American Vietnamese woman coming back to Vietnam to escape her family and the story from the 1980s of a young, rich woman that disappears without trace. However, once you dig your teeth into it a bit more, there is so much more packed in his book. In addition to Winnie and the woman from the 1980s there is a long list of characters coming in and out, some with magical abilities that are thrust on us without a lot of warning or context clues. The narrative switches the reader between the two stories, indicated at the start of the chapter, but even with that, some chapters were quite confusing as to what is going on.

Because there is such a long list of characters, not all of them are given the same attention and the development opportunities. In fact, a lot of them did not even have a name, while others had multiple names making it a challenge to understand who they are and what they are doing. The use of magical realism is frequent and I am not sure if it always functioned well under the rules of the novel. Perhaps if I was more knowledgeable about Vietnamese folk stories and traditions, it would have made more sense, but at times I was quite lost as to what it was that I was reading. I appreciated the opportunity to learn about them, but at times they felt very jumbled and at times veered too far into stereotypes that felt overused and quite frankly dull.

The stories do get somewhat intertwined together towards the end and it becomes clearer to the reader who is who, but I still failed  to quite wrap my head around every single character. Because of the constant shift, it was hard to keep track of all the side characters and their role into the larger narrative. This also added to the more episodic nature of the novel, and if there was less of this kind of narrative, I do believe that the novel would have been more successful. Some of the threads just fizzled out and just two weeks after finishing this novel, I found that a lot of it was not memorable at all.

I did enjoy the descriptions of Vietnam from this perspective and it had a huge effect on me. The narrow streets, smells and sounds felt real and it sounded like it came from someone who really liked this place, but also knew it well. The commentary of gentrification of some parts of Saigon by Western ESL teachers was quite effective, even if a bit too emphasized at turns. Similarly, the treatment of Winnie who did not really belong to either West or East was quite compelling and I felt emotional about her attempts to find something to do and some meaning in her life. The depictions of violence endured by women was subtle, but clear and it made me nauseous at times. Unfortunately, this was the only part of the novel that truly worked for me.

Overall, I unfortunately cannot say that I enjoyed this novel as much as I thought I would. It felt rushed but also slow at the same time. The ending was disappointing and I felt like I missed something, but it does appear that a lot of reviewers felt the same way. On all accounts, I should really like this-it has multiple POVs, historical fiction elements, magical realism, in an interesting setting with a different culture, with female protagonists. While I enjoyed some elements of it, the more I thought about it, the less I liked it.

I rated this ⅖ at the end.