Build Your House Around My Body - Thought-Provoking Literary Fiction Novel for Book Clubs & Contemporary Readers | Perfect for Book Discussions & Personal Reflection

This is a masterful novel. The language is riveting, the feeling throughout is haunting, the settings are wonderfully drawn. I tend to be drawn to books of atmosphere and excellent writing, and this book met these criteria in high style. Kupersmith’s writing includes exquisite details, creative language, perfect observations. Weather, landscape, various neighborhoods and places, a rubber tree forest of snakes, Saigon coffee houses and karaoke bars, a cemetery – all are vividly, sensually described. And much more so than the characters, who are more symbols than fleshed out humans (or ghosts). With so much raw misery and ugliness, it is hard to feel drawn to anyone. Vietnam is very much a character in the story. The effects of colonialism, the violent exploitation of the body, the melding of French, American and Vietnamese. Beyond the country, there are a cast of characters, not always easy to remember in their fascinating detail. Themes of the book include the body and its violations, revenge, trauma, sense of one’s self. It’s all held together with folklore, the supernatural. What was harder for me about the book was the abject nature of just about everything. This is a book that is so complex, with so much going on, that it begs for a second reading, yet the thought of doing so makes me slightly nauseous. Nothing is happy or optimistic or beautiful here. The police are lazy and corrupt, dogs are starving and apt to be scooped up and sold for meat, women are abused, excrement and bodily fluids are everywhere, the culture involves a lot of alcohol and karaoke, people wallow in self-abuse, and even the ghosts have suffered and inflict suffering. Snakes and smoke monsters, people turning their bodies inside-out—none of it feels pleasant. Beyond the halfway point of the novel, I began to wonder if it wasn’t a novel at all but a series of short stories. There are so many separate sections of vastly different time periods and character groupings, which never seemed to come together. They do come together by the end to make up what is definitely a cohesive novel, though I have to wonder if there weren’t a number of suspenseful threads that never get tied up. (This is where the second reading would come in handy.) However, while I often dislike novels that skip to a different character or time period when it interrupts the flow or prevents the reader from getting in deeper with a character, that is definitely not the case here. The transitions add to the complexity; they completely work with the theme, evolving thoughtfully. This is a writer to watch for in future books. I can hardly believe this is a debut novel. The interweaving of the real and the supernatural is simply brilliant and fascinating. I only wish I could bring myself to read it a second time…