Book review: Thuan’s absurdist detective novel Elevator In Saigon lingers on Vietnam’s past

By Thuan, translated by Nguyen An Ly
Fiction/Tilted Axis Press/Paperback/190 pages/$29.95

Strains of French absurdist Albert Camus’ The Stranger (1942) can be heard in the detached narrator’s lines that open Vietnamese novelist Thuan’s Elevator In Saigon: “My mother died on a night of torrential rain. A night of unseasonal rain in 2004.”