Thuận

Le métro s'arrête : colis suspect. Pour la narratrice, une Vietnamienne qui vit à Belleville, le temps s'arrête aussi. Son fils s'endort sur son épaule tandis que commence un long monologue intérieur qui ne s'interrompt qu'au départ de la rame, à la dernière ligne du livre. De la vie étriquée de Hanoi postcommuniste à la banlieue parisienne où elle enseigne l'anglais, en passant par cinq années d'études à Leningrad, elle tente de comprendre ce qu'elle a subi plus que vécu : sa passion pour Thuy, un Chinois de Hanoi qu'elle n'a pas revu depuis onze ans et qui vit à Cholon, le Chinatown de Saigon. Si l'écriture - le lecteur découvre des extraits de son roman intitulé I'm yellow, traversé par un train mystérieux, écho du métro - lui permet de vivre l'éloignement, l'enfant qu'elle a eu avec Thuy lui sert de lien entre le passé et l'avenir. Les phrases qu'elle martèle sont autant de tentatives désespérées, où se mêlent autodérision et humour, pour fixer ce monologue qui lui échappe, pour exorciser cette passion qui la hante.

Chinatown

Personal and political, tragic and bitingly satirical, an ethereal journey through Hanoi, Saigon, Paris, Pyongyang, and Seoul.

Elevator in Sài Gòn

An abandoned package is discovered in the Paris Metro: the subway workers suspect it's a terrorist bomb. A Vietnamese woman sitting nearby, her son asleep on her shoulder, waits and begins to reflect on her life, from her constrained childhood in communist Hanoi, to a long period of study in Lenin-grad during the Gorbachev period, and finally to the Parisian suburbs where she now teaches English. Through everything runs her passion for Thuy, the father of her son, a writer who lives in Saigon's Chinatown, and who, with the shadow of the China-Vietnam border war falling darkly between them, she has not seen for eleven years. Through her breathless, vertiginous, and deeply moving monologue from beside the subway tracks-interspersed with extracts from Thuy's own novel-the narrator attempts to once and for all face the past and exorcise the passion that haunts her

"From the author of Chinatown comes a personal and political, tragic and bitingly satirical, ethereal journey through Hanoi, Saigon, Paris, Pyongyang, and Seoul. A 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, 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 Polotski, who emerges from her mother's notebook. Like an amateur sleuth, she trails Polotski 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 Asia--trying to find clues to the spiralling, deepening questions her mother left behind unanswered--and perhaps unanswerable. Still banned in Vietnam, Elevator in Saigon is a suspenseful novel that is part detective story, historical romance, postcolonial ghost story, and a biting satire of life in a communist state."--

Thuận

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