The Sympathizer: Pulitzer Prize-Winning Novel of Human Compassion and Conflict

BOB: Viet Thanh Nguyen’s 2015 novel, ‘The Sympathizer’, has some of the best opening lines I’ve read in many years:
‘I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces. Perhaps not surprisingly, I am also a man of two minds…Sometimes I flatter myself that this is a talent, and although it is admittedly one of a minor nature, it is perhaps also the sole talent I possess. At other times, when I reflect on how I cannot help but observe the world in such a fashion, I wonder if what I have should even be called a talent. After all, a talent is something you use, not something that uses you. The talent you cannot not use, the talent that possesses you—that is a hazard, I must confess.’

This title character, this ‘sympathizer,’ unnamed throughout the novel, is writing his confession, which implies that whatever use he has put his talent to throughout the course of the novel, has gotten him captured or caught in a trap of some kind.

The theme of doubleness permeates almost every aspect of this novel. The title character was the product of a French priest’s rape of a South Vietnamese woman in the 1950’s. At some point he was fortunate to go to the USA...

United States on Jan 28, 2023

dave: Imagine sitting down on a couch at a party and someone who has had 9 strong drinks, a whole pot of coffee, 15 cigarettes and 3 lines of coke comes along and tries to tell you a story that covers 20 years of his/her life. That's this book.
Parts of this book have no reason to be there. Others yes, but only stick together as a story much like you've used the wrong glue to hold your shoe together - a few steps and right back to the original problem. Much of the book is commentary on the U.S./Vietnam societal issues that, although were and are real, are expressed by the author as if they are new found revelations. Social commentary is not a good mindset for an author to be in when writing a fiction novel.
Perhaps the author BEGAN the book in 1975 and just finished in 2016 due to lack of focus on any one given story line. In all fairness this simply could be the fault of the publisher and their editors. Either way the book becomes almost unreadable by about 75% - though I got frustrated by 62% but kept going as long as I could.
The one thing I loved about the novel was the humo(u)r. The complete troll of Apocalypse Now is quite funny -especially one line that works only for...

Canada on Jan 10, 2021

Ralph Blumenau: WARNING: This review may look like a spoiler, but this bare outline of the story does not reveal the long novel’s sometimes self-indulgent and overly leisurely and digressive richness: the picture of Vietnam at war; the attitude of the Vietnamese refugees in the United States towards the Americans, and the American attitudes towards the Vietnamese; communist and anti-communist beliefs; the elaborate back stories of all the characters. There is humour, some of it hilarious and lubricious; there is cynicism; there are scathing and very long descriptions of Hollywood’s representations of the Vietnam War, clearly inspired by the film “Apocalypse Now”; there are the horrors of war and of torture; there are the elements of a thriller, and the book is full of incidents and reflections. There is a modish and irritating absence of speech marks; but that it not the main reason why I found some passages quite obscure. The most obscure of all for me were the brutal scenes at the end of the book: what happened to the narrator’s mind when he was being tortured to confess what his torturers expected him to confess, but which he was unable to recall. Since this is the climax of the...

United Kingdom on Mar 03, 2018

Volker Jentsch: Würde ich dieses Buch ein zweites Mal lesen? Nie und nimmer. Es ist absurd, ja, aber wohl auch sehr tatsächlich; es ist, trotz erheiternder Momente, von Anfang bis Ende nichts anderes als schmerzhaft. Es erzählt Unmenschliches. Der Held des Buches: Ein gespaltener Vietnamese, halb auf der Seites des Vietcong, halb auf der Seite des CIA; halb moralisch, halb unmoralisch, halb pazifistisch und halb mörderisch. Mit und ohne Gewissen, je nachdem. Eine Schlüsselstelle der Absurdität ist die Ermordung eines Vietnamesen, der den Revanchismus der vietnamesischen Exilanten in Amerika in Frage stellt. Der Held selbst tötet ihn, gegen alle Vernunft; und ist dabei auf unvorstellbare, womöglich auch ungewollte Weise mörderisch. So ist das Buch ein Spiegelbild des Vietnam-Krieges, in dem, vermutlich mehr als in allen anderen, vorangegangenen Kriegen, am Ende niemand mehr zu unterscheiden weiß zwischen der guten und der bösen Seite, den Unterdrückern und Unterdrückten. Der Autor weiß das überzeugend darzustellen: So könnte es gewesen sein.
Übrigens: Wer sich im Englisch üben will, lese die englische Version, am besten mit einem Wörterbuch daneben, denn der vietnamesische...

Germany on Dec 01, 2017

Robert L. Bowie, a.k.a. U.R. Bowie: The Sympathizer, by Viet Thanh Nguyen
Don’t bother reading all the blurbs that go with the paperback edition of this book (The Sympathizer, Grove Press, 382 pages). Just read the first page; already you know you are in the presence of a talented writer. Here’s how we begin:

“I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces. Perhaps not surprisingly, I am also a man of two minds. I am not some misunderstood mutant from a comic book or a horror movie, although some have treated me as such. I am simply able to see any issue from both sides.”

We are not surprised later to learn that the narrator—never named, known only as the Captain—loves Russian novels, for this first paragraph recalls the beginning of Dostoevsky’s “Notes from the Underground,” featuring one of the most perverse split-personality ironist narrators in the history of world literature: “I’m a sick man . . . I’m a spiteful man. Unpleasant is what I am as a man. I think my liver is diseased. But then, I don’t know jack squat about my illness, and probably don’t even know what hurts where. I don’t seek treatment, and never have, although I respect medicine and...

United States on Mar 16, 2017

Alysson Oliveira: A Guerra do Vietnã é um ponto nevrálgico na história e na produção cultural dos EUA. O que mais existe é a tentativa de uma reconstrução – ou, ao menos, maquiagem – da narrativa histórica, e com isso raramente se dá voz aos vietnamitas. Robert Olen Butler é um dos poucos a fazer isso, na coletânea “A Good Scent From a Strange Moutain”. Por isso mesmo, THE SYMPATHIZER, de Viet Thanh Nguyen, é de extrema importância. Nascido no Vietnã, ele e sua família se mudaram para os EUA em 1975, mas não é isso que realmente importa aqui – o que vale é que ele escreveu um tremendo de um romance que não apenas dá voz aos seus conterrâneos, mas mais do que isso lhes dá um ponto de vista.

A bem da verdade, é um ponto de vista fraturado, cindido entre um fascínio hipnotizado com os EUA e sua lealdade à terra natal – e, realmente, haveria outra forma de narrar essa história? O romance tem um tom tragicômico em sua abordagem na incompreensão entre o ocidente e o oriente, e coloca ao centro um dilema moral: qual escolher? Ou mais do que isso, porque escolher?

Seu narrador e protagonista, que não tem nome, é um sujeito dividido entre os dois...

Brazil on May 24, 2016

Len: Beginning in Vietnam, the story starts with the American evacuation of Saigon at the end of the war. Our protagonist is a captain and translator to a general in the South Vietnamese Army and so, is one of the fortunate few to get on a list of those who will be evacuated to the United States. Unlike those he will accompany, he neither Vietnamese nor American. He is the son of a French priest and a young Vietnamese woman and a spy for the North Vietnamese. He lives in many worlds and none. His sympathies must lie both with Whites and Asians, the South and the North Vietnamese. Thus, the reader is exposed to world of many perspectives. Nguyen writes of the protagonist's experiences at university in France, the evacuation from Saigon, the life of refugees in California, the hypocrisy of making a film about Vietnam without input from the Vietnamese, post-war Vietnam and the process of re-educating the South Vietnamese. The writing is fantastic providing some truly terrific insights. Speaking of America's film industry, Nguyen writes 'Hollywood's function [is to launch] the intercontinental ballistic missile of Americanization,' or 'Americans on the average do not trust intellectuals,...

Canada on Sep 29, 2015