Description
A profound, startling, and beautifully crafted debut novel, The Sympathizer is the story of a man of two minds, someone whose political beliefs clash with his individual loyalties. In dialogue with but diametrically opposed to the narratives of the Vietnam War that have preceded it, this novel offers an important and unfamiliar new perspective on the war: that of a conflicted communist sympathizer.
It is April 1975, and Saigon is in chaos. At his villa, a general of the South Vietnamese army is drinking whiskey and, with the help of his trusted captain, drawing up a list of those who will be given passage aboard the last flights out of the country. The general and his compatriots start a new life in Los Angeles, unaware that one among their number, the captain, is secretly observing and reporting on the group to a higher-up in the Viet Cong. The Sympathizer is the story of this captain: a man brought up by an absent French father and a poor Vietnamese mother, a man who went to university in America, but returned to Vietnam to fight for the Communist cause. Viet Thanh Nguyen’s astonishing novel takes us inside the mind of this double agent, a man whose lofty ideals necessitate his betrayal of the people closest to him. A gripping spy novel, an astute exploration of extreme politics, and a moving love story, The Sympathizer explores a life between two worlds and examines the legacy of the Vietnam War in literature, film, and the wars we fight today.
Lukas –
“We’re revolutionaries, and revolutionaries can never be innocent. We know too much and have done too much.” Impressive and provocative debut novel by Vietnamese-born, American-based writer Viet Thahn Nguyen. There have been so many films and books about Vietnam, but as I was reading this, I realized almost all of those, even anti-war ones, were from the American perspective. So if readers find if “heavy-handed” or lacking in humor or hard to get past page 5 (really?), maybe they’re the problem. The book, narrated by a half-French, half-Vietnamese communist agent, is about more than just the war, but about the conflicted relationship between the Vietnamese and the Americans, racial identity, and the effect of politics on the individual (I”m not sure how you write a novel about Vietnam that isn’t political.). Nguyen is a vital new voice in fiction and I look forward to reading his latest book, “The Refugees.” “Sometimes I dreamed of trying to pull a mask off my face, only to realize that the mask was my face.”