2024/082: Build Your House Around My Body — Violet Kupersmith

2024/082: Build Your House Around My Body — Violet Kupersmith

There was a tacit agreement between them to never, ever bring up the incident in the graveyard, and to avoid all topics that might possibly lead to it -- the dead, the undead, the pass in nearby Chu Dreh that was haunted by French soldiers, a spirit-possessed neighbor who had spent a full week speaking in tongues and eating nothing but bananas before abruptly returning to normal with no memory of it, the water ghosts of Ea Wy, the disappearance and rescue of the Ma daughter under mysterious circumstances back in the eighties, anything involving funerals.[p. 142]

From the very first page -- with its chapter heading 'June 2010, Saigon, Nine Months Before Winnie’s Disappearance' -- we know that Winnie, a young Vietnamese-American woman visiting Vietnam for the first time, is going to disappear. But how? And why?( Read more... )