The Sympathizer

But I could still recognize him, for who but a man with two minds could understand a man with no face?

Staggering. A story that is political satire, spy lit, and character/cultural study all at once, conveyed with sweeping prose of description and dialogue, memory and present, all which bleed together in Nguyen's gorgeous writing. The pure artistry of the language here is at times electrifying, yet the content itself is so bleak in itself, despite the excellent humorous touches. Despite the soaring ambitions, almost everything here worked for me, my only significant complaint being the writing of women, which is the only place the lovely description really falters. I can understand why others claim this overwritten or didactic, but I really liked the style here, and how it so effortlessly blends fact and fiction. I'm thinking a light 4.5 stars.

Refugee, exile, immigrant – whatever species of displaced human we were, we did not simply live in two cultures, as celebrants of the great American melting pot imagined. Displaced people also lived in two time zones, the here and the there, the present and the past, being as we were reluctant time travelers. But while science fiction imagined time travelers as moving forward or backwards in time, this timepiece demonstrated a different chronology. The open secret of the clock, naked for all to see, was that we were only going in circles.

I always feel silly writing a review for something that won a major award (like, you know, a Pulitzer). This novel is fantastic, obviously. I think it speaks eloquently, bravely, and humorously to the messiness of moral injury in the course and aftermath of war and geopolitics, while managing to steer clear of moralizing. The narrator is one of my favorites in literature, I think; if it weren't enabling his alcoholism, I'd want to have a drink with him.

Offensive on some levels, but also very moving, disturbing, thought-provoking, compelling–everything I want in a novel. (Before someone asks, as a white American, I do take some offense at the narrator's racial generalizations, which I understand fit his character and his experiences with Americans, particularly white Americans. I am not offended by his being anti-American, given what my country did to Vietnam.)

The only name the narrator of this book has is his title, “Captain.” He's a man pulled between two poles in many ways–illegitimate son of a French Catholic priest and a Vietnamese village girl, educated in America, assistant to a general in the South Vietnamese army, and a spy for the Communists. He's also “blood brothers” with a fierce anti-Communist countryman AND an equally fierce secret Communist.

The story covers the Captain's escape from Vietnam during the fall of Saigon with the General and his anti-Communist blood brother Bon, their time as refugees in California, and their secret journey back to Vietnam in an attempt to continue the war against the victorious Viet Cong.

It's both a spy novel in the tradition of John Le Carre and a dryly funny novel about being a Vietnamese refugee in America. The Captain characterizes himself as a man who can see both sides of any issue. He is ambivalent about whether that is a virtue or a hazard. What he describes of his life shows us that the accident of his birth means that he is not fully accepted in any of the worlds where he travels. In Vietnam he's a bastard and a half breed, and thus disreputable. In Western society, although he has an advanced Western education, he's burdened by all the preconceptions and stereotypes foisted upon Asians generally and Vietnamese particularly.

This is just a brilliant book, for the combination of complex character being pushed and pulled by forces both inside and outside of him, spy thriller, and wry social commentary. I loved it.

• Interesting central conceit (Vietnamese double agent after the end of the Vietnam war).
  + Had some good satirical parts, e.g. making the Vietnam war film and other commentary on life in the US.
  
  - Writing was very rambling, especially in the last third. Really could have used some editing. The whole last third felt like a bad version of Darkness at Noon.
  - The ending was really illogical and random.
  - The main character was not very interesting. It wasn't clear what his motivations were and why we should really care about him.
  - I wish it had explored more about either the Vietnamese immigrant experience or life in Vietnam after the end of the war.

I tried this book on a whim because it purported to be about a spy. And while I did not get the espionage I thought I would, I was not disappointed.

This book is about mankind, war, and the political struggles on the smallest scale all set against the backdrop of the Vietnam War.

The social commentary was poignant. The cultural commentary will annihilate American xenophobia. The deeply flawed inner dialogue was relatable. And the climax was perfectly tailored.

Every single word in this book was painstaking labored over. That effort, alone, the craftsmanship of the writing will be an intoxication to the reader.

i love viet thanh nguyen. i loved his short story compilation “the refugees”. i love reading from vietnamese diaspora. but yknow what i really hate this book because i know that he's writing in this style to convey SOMETHING but honestly it just rubs off as pretentious and annoying and i don't think i feel like finishing this...ever

the next guy that writes about how viet girls look “virginal” in their ao dai i will manifest in their home and curse their family lineage. remembered why i liked reading from women of color and not men

This blew the doors off my own cultural understanding of Vietnam. Raised in North America through the 80's and 90's Vietnam is invoked as more an idea than a country. Vietnam is the backdrop to American reckoning, set to the music of Creedence Clearwater Revival. The people of Vietnam are mere props in the ongoing narrative the West tells itself. Americans are the heroes or anti-heroes in the story, the main protagonists while the Vietnamese are relegated to the margins. The complete appropriation of the idea of Vietnam by the Hollywood machine is just jaw-dropping. Vietnam invokes Marlon Brando whispering “the horror”, R. Lee Ermey dressing down recruits and Tom Berenger with his arms raised as he's gunned down. Vietnam has been repeatedly sold to me as a white American story whether it's Rambo rescuing POWs or Trump dodging the draft. And Viet Thanh Nguyen gets me thinking about all that while skewering a thinly veiled representation of Apocalypse Now as the director in the book may or may not have tried to have our protagonist killed. Just wild.

This is a book by a Vietnamese writer writing to the Vietnamese people. From its harrowing first pages as we see the fall of Saigon from a perspective I'm only just realizing I've never considered, to the torture nearing the end that is the most visceral, mind altering passage I've read that doesn't need to rely on gore. (Also the most extreme writers workshop I've ever seen rendered on the page.) The Vietnamese here are refugees, not immigrants. Former soldiers, counter-revolutionaries and patriots finding themselves suddenly living tiny, mediocre lives tending liquor stores and working in restaurants. Like our protagonist in the opening lines of the book they are of two minds. Not always an easy read but perspective changing ...and a tip of the hat to the badly abused squid.

The Sympathizer is an intense and profound novel that is primarily about Vietnam war, but deals with contemporary issues like migration, alienation and futility of blind idealism. It is a worrying portrayal of how the society tends to keep apart the individual who are broad minded in outlook.

Read the full story:

http://diaryofaragingbull.blogspot.com/2017/01/the-sympathizer-complex-duality.html

Fantastic prose and cast-iron character building. I had to take large breaks from reading this for reasons unrelated to the book, and the characters came back to me like bulls on a rampage when I came back to this novel. I don't have to tell you that this is razor-sharp political commentary, but I can tell you that it draws blood without trying. Nguyen's novel is so historically rich, so politically apt, and so deliciously reflective. 
The last act was blinding, much like the main character's experience and I loved/hated every second. Wow!
One flaw is I felt it dragged in the beginning.

I'm not entirely sure how to review this one. It's a war story. A refugee story. A spy novel. A Hollywood story. It does not revel in violence, but it also doesn't shy away from telling about the violence of war (and as such, take this as your content warning): napalm, gang rape, torture, murder, dismemberment through landmines and other remnants of war, “re-education” of those who were subversives against the communists.

Most of the book is about the narrator's time in America, after a wild escape from Vietnam towards the end of the war, when the Americans were trying to pull out but the communists were still trying to take back their country. The writing was excellent, with great use of metaphor. I liked the main character, even though you know from the beginning that he's a double agent. It was interesting to live in his head for a while, especially because he felt so much guilt about so much of the stuff that he did.

It was a really interesting read, and different than anything else I've read about Vietnam or the Vietnam War.

I realized about a third of the way in why this wasn't totally landing for me. Despite the author's clear talent, the major device of this book is that the double-agent narrator is in a re-education camp, writing and re-writing his confession until the Commandant of the camp is satisfied with his story. Because of this, big chunks felt like telling instead of showing? Which I suppose was necessary for the device to work. I couldn't figure out why, 100+ pages in, it still felt like I'd barely cracked into the story, but I think that's it.