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The Sympathizer: Soon to be a Sky Exclusive limited series on Sky 01 Edition, Kindle Edition
by Viet Thanh Nguyen (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
4.2 4.2 out of 5 stars 24,644 ratings
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*** WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION 2016***
WINNER OF THE EDGAR AWARD FOR BEST FIRST NOVEL 2016
WINNER OF THE CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE IN FICTION 2016
'A fierce novel written in a refreshingly high style and charged with intelligent rage' Financial Times
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. 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.
'A bold, artful and globally minded reimagining of the Vietnam war . . . The Sympathizer is an excellent literary novel, and one that ends, with unsettling present-day resonance, in a refugee boat where opposing ideas about intentions, actions and their consequences take stark and resilient human form' the Guardian
'Beautifully written and meaty'
Claire Messud
'[A] remarkable debut novel . . . In its final chapters, The Sympathizer becomes an absurdist tour de force that might have been written by a Kafka or Genet'
New York Times
'This debut is a page-turner (read: everybody will finish) that makes you reconsider the Vietnam War ... Nguyen's darkly comic novel offers a point of view about American culture that we've rarely seen'
Oprah's Book Club Suggestions
20 August 2015
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'[A] remarkable debut ... fills a void in literature, giving voice to the previously voiceless ... An absurdist tour de force that might have been written by a Kafka or Genet.' (The New York Times Book Review)
'A fierce novel written in a refreshingly high style and charged with intelligent rage.' (The Financial Times)
'This impressive debut contains a Whitman-like multiplicity ... A bold, artful and globally minded reimagining of the Vietnam war ...' (The Guardian) --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.
Review
[A] remarkable debut novel . . . [Nguyen] brings a distinctive perspective to the war and its aftermath. His book fills a void in the literature, giving voice to the previously voiceless while it compels the rest of us to look at the events of 40 years ago in a new light. But this tragicomic novel reaches beyond its historical context to illuminate more universal themes . . . The nameless protagonist-narrator, a memorable character despite his anonymity, is an Americanized Vietnamese with a divided heart and mind. Nguyen's skill in portraying this sort of ambivalent personality compares favorably with masters like Conrad, Greene, and le Carre. . . . Both thriller and social satire. . . . In its final chapters, The Sympathizer becomes an absurdist tour de force that might have been written by a Kafka or Genet. - Philip Caputo, New York Times Book Review
Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Sympathizer brilliantly draws you in with the opening line: "I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces." It's thrilling, rhythmic, and astonishing, as is the rest of Nguyen's enthralling portrayal of the Vietnam War. The narrator is an undercover communist agent posing as a captain in the Southern Vietnamese Army. Set during the fall of Saigon and the years after in America, the captain spies on the general and the men he escaped with, sharing his information with his communist blood brothers in coded letters. But when his allegiance is called into question, he must act in a way that will haunt him forever. Political, historical, romantic and comic, The Sympathizer is a rich and hugely gratifying story that captures the complexity of the war and what it means to be of two minds. - Al Woodworth, Amazon Best Book of April 2015
Not only does Viet Thanh Nguyen bring a rare and authentic voice to the body of American literature generated by the Vietnam War, he has created a book that transcends history and politics and nationality and speaks to the enduring theme of literature: the universal quest for self, for identity. The Sympathizer is a stellar debut by a writer of depth and skill - Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain
Trapped in endless civil war, 'the man who has two minds' tortures and is tortured as he tries to meld the halves of his country and of himself. Viet Thanh Nguyen accomplishes this integration in a magnificent feat of storytelling. The Sympathizer is a novel of literary, historical, and political importance. - Maxine Hong Kingston, author of The Fifth Book of Peace --This text refers to the paperback edition.
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Product details
ASIN : B00X7UHWB0
Publisher : Corsair; 1st edition (20 August 2015)
Language : English
File size : 3540 KB
Text-to-Speech : Enabled
Screen Reader : Supported
Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
X-Ray : Not Enabled
Word Wise : Enabled
Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
Print length : 424 pagesBest Sellers Rank: 25,279 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)12 in Asian American Literature
27 in Asian-American Literature
39 in U.S. Literary ClassicsCustomer Reviews:
4.2 4.2 out of 5 stars 24,644 ratings
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Viet Thanh Nguyen
Viet Thanh Nguyen was born in Vietnam and raised in America. He is the author of The Committed, which continues the story of The Sympathizer, awarded the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, alongside seven other prizes. He is also the author of the short story collection The Refugees; the nonfiction book Nothing Ever Dies, a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award; the children's book Chicken of the Sea, with his son Ellison and with Thi Bui and Hien Bui-Stafford; and is the editor of an anthology of refugee writing, The Displaced. He is a University Professor and the Aerol Arnold Professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California and a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur foundations. He lives in Los Angeles.
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Jollop
4.0 out of 5 stars Challenging BookReviewed in Australia on 26 April 2021
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A challenging book from a range of perspectives where the protagonist, a refugee and spy makes a confession to an unnamed Commandant who later is revealed as his captor. Initially, he is as an aide to “the general”, chief of the national police and later as his unpaid ‘gopher’ following their fleeing of Saigon. Through his role as a man with ‘two faces’ (later, two minds) the tragedy of the war where the Vietnamese are generally seen as bit players is dispelled. I struggled with the later chapters where the mood darkened and the ending seeming disconnected to what had occurred previously.
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Tim Nicholas
4.0 out of 5 stars Masterfully written.Reviewed in Australia on 1 February 2021
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This is a wild 'ride' from Vietnam to LA and back. Over the course of the book many 'home truths' about relationships, culture, and loyalty are laid bare. A real thought-provoking story.
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Tina
4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent read.Reviewed in Australia on 4 April 2017
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Having lived in Vietnam in the 90s I found this book a great read and highly recommend it. Even today the Vietnam war continues to be of interest and this book presents such a different view point. There is a good deal of humour some romance great characters and also vivid and graphic scenes of torture and murder.
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John Morgan
5.0 out of 5 stars Brutally realistic portrayal of US- Vietnam relations. Gripping throughout.Reviewed in Australia on 5 April 2021
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Compelling narrative of vitriolic relations between the US and Vietnam for a number of decades. Such lucid and realistic discussion as in this Viet Thanh Nguyen novel can only be good for everybody trying to deal with the legacy of that conflict.
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Gary Cassidy
3.0 out of 5 stars Great to frustrating readReviewed in Australia on 30 August 2019
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Mostly a good read. Found the depth of the characters couldn’t the length of the book. 100 pages too long.
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Yvette Diaz
5.0 out of 5 stars like the squid scene and interrogation scenesReviewed in Australia on 25 September 2016
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This book was overwhelming and educational. It explores identity, friendship, politics, war, and torture. I learnt different ways of looking at Vietnamese and American culture. Certain parts in the book stand out, like the squid scene and interrogation scenes. I need to read this book again to better understand the ideas that have been brought up.
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SatsF
4.0 out of 5 stars Gripping and RepellingReviewed in Australia on 17 November 2016
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Fascinating read, beautifully crafted book even though the ending was a little disappointing.
This is a period of history that will haunt 'politics' forever..retold with great tact by the author.
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Jim KABLE
5.0 out of 5 stars Dividing One's SympathiesReviewed in Australia on 28 November 2017
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Brilliant book full of truth out of the craziness of seeking liberation from colonization and then further invasion and colonization by a powerful "friend" playing the "them" and "us" dangerous game. Very impressive - as seen from my Australian eyes!
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BOB
4.0 out of 5 stars The sympathizer with ‘double’ visionReviewed in the United States on 28 January 2023
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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 for an education, then return to South Vietnam to aid in the South Vietnamese war for independence, becoming the captain of a Special Forces unit and reporting to ‘the General’—many characters in this novel are never named, only referred to by their role in society. The sympathizer is a double agent, ostensibly aiding the South Vietnamese cause but covertly reporting back to his communist North Vietnamese handlers in letters sent back to his “French aunt” in which messages between the lines are written in invisible ink. He went to college with two best friends, Bon and Man. Bon is a fellow South Vietnamese soldier. Man is one of his North Vietnamese handlers.
At one point, the narrator is offered the job of a consultant on the production of a film about the Vietnam War, titled ‘The Hamlet’. What follows is a brilliant satire of American moviemaking in the years immediately following the end of the war. The production has allusions to ‘Apocalypse Now’, ‘Platoon’, ‘Full Metal Jacket’ and many other films of that era. The director of the film, The Auteur, doesn’t really care about authenticity beyond what serves his ‘vision’, despite the Sympathizer’s attempts to populate the extras with authentic South Vietnamese people’ he is pretty clearly Francis Ford Coppola. The Thespian seems modeled after Marlon Brando, the veteran actor whose method acting leads to his refusal to bathe for six months. The narrator pities any actor who has to be in close proximity to the Thespian for hours at a time while the Auteur insists on take after take to arrive at ‘perfection’. Lingering in a set designer-built graveyard on which he wrote the name of his mother, honoring her at a movie grave as he never could honor her at a real one, the Sympathizer is almost killed when the overzealous Auteur adds additional explosives to detonate the graveyard as part of the big climax to the film. He escapes with a concussion and burn injuries, paranoid enough to believe that the timing for the detonation may have been intentional, considering the value the Auteur put on this troublesome Asian’s life.
The Sympathizer executes two ‘double agents’ after presenting evidence to the General to prove his usefulness as a faithful aid but their ghosts haunt him throughout the rest of the novel. When the General rounds up his army of former soldiers that served under him as part of an effort to retake their country back, Bon, who saw his wife and young son killed as they were attempting to board the plane out of Saigon, has nothing left to live for and is anxious to serve in the force. Despite the General’s (and his North Vietnamese handler’s) insistence that he is of much more use to the Movement (overt and covert) by staying behind in the U.S., he insists on accompanying the soldiers back to their homeland. He wants to save Bon’s life but he is aware of the paradox of betraying him while saving him. Both of their lives are spared but they end up as captives, where the Sympathizer is in a solitary cell, given pens and plenty of paper and instructed to write his confession. When the confession is rejected for lack of sincerity and the honest desire to be purged of his subversive inclinations, he is brought to a completely white room and subjected to psychological torture conducted by his other best friend, Man. The torture scenes have a similar effect to the relentless torture in ‘1984’, rendered with tedious monotony until the prisoner has lost all sense of self or identity that enabled him to function as an egoic being.
I bought the ebook version of this novel and highlighted almost every other paragraph of the first half of the book. There are so many quotable passages:
On America: ‘America, land of supermarkets and superhighways, of supersonic jets and Superman, of supercarriers and the Super Bowl! America, a country not content simply to give itself a name on its bloody birth, but one that insisted for the first time in history on a mysterious acronym, USA, a trifecta of letters outdone later only by the quartet of the USSR. Although every country thought itself its own way, was there ever a country that coined so many “super” terms from the federal bank of its narcissism, was not only superconfident but also truly superpowerful, that would not be satisfied until it locked every nation of the world into a full nelson and made it cry Uncle Sam?’
On Hollywood movies made about the Vietnam War: ‘His arrogance marked something new in the world, for this was the first war where the losers would write history instead of the victors, courtesy of the most efficient propaganda machine ever created (with all due respect to Joseph Goebbels and the Nazis, who never achieved global domination). Hollywood’s high priests understood innately the observation of Milton’s Satan, that it was better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven, better to be a villain, loser, or antihero than virtuous extra, so long as one commanded the bright lights of center stage.’
‘The Sympathizer’ is a brilliant espionage novel and a welcome change from the Americentric stories that have been told over the last half century to enable Americans to make narrative sense of a war that was waged and lost for a number of less than noble reasons. What is often lost in Vietnam War narratives is the perspective of the Vietnamese people themselves, including the ‘boat people’, of which Viet Thanh Nguyen is one, having come to the U.S. at the age of four. The nameless narrator’s perspective provides a unique vantage point from which to view the entire episode.
While it is masterful, it doesn’t quite reach universal classic/masterpiece status as one of the works to which it has been compared—Dostoevsky’s ‘Crime and Punishment’, for example. There are a few narrative strands that are not satisfactorily resolved such as the narrator’s affair with the General’s daughter. While the narrator’s re-education by the Communists is questionable, his torturer is not as heartless as he would need to be in order to be an effective brainwasher. The sympathizer lives to occupy another story; hence, the sequel, ‘The Committed’, which I intend to read. ‘The Sympathizer’ is a great novel with a few flaws but definitely worth reading. Viet Thanh Nguyen is a brilliant writer.
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Robert L. Bowie, a.k.a. U.R. Bowie
5.0 out of 5 stars has an excellent grasp of English and vast insights into American cultureReviewed in the United States on 16 March 2017
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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 doctors.”
Although he is not up in your face as forcefully as is Dostoevsky’s narrator, the Captain is in a similar limbo, living the life of in-between—neither fish nor fowl. Early in his career Dostoevsky wrote “The Double,” featuring a man who literally splits into two, and he was by far not the first European writer to air out the theme of the bifurcated psyche. So here we are, in a novel of the twenty-first century, reaching back into a grand tradition in Western literary art: the theme of the split, the two in one. This is the major theme of The Sympathizer.
The Captain was born bifurcated, and nobody among the Vietnamese who surround him has ever let him forget it. He is “the bastard,” illegitimate son of a Vietnamese mother and a French father, who is a Catholic priest to boot. He is a mixture of the Occident and the Orient. He has lived and studied in the U.S., has an excellent grasp of English and vast insights into American culture. Throughout the novel he seeks a resolution to his bifurcation. He never finds it, and at the end he is just as mixed up and split as he was at the beginning.
The theme is not all-inclusive, but, nonetheless, quite broad. Take Abe, the uncle of the Captain’s Japanese-American mistress (another character living, in her own unique way, with the split). Abe was born Japanese in the U.S., put in an interment camp during W.W. II. After the war, seeking his true identity, he went back to live in Japan, where no one accepted him as Japanese. Neither fish nor fowl.
As the action of the novel begins, we learn that the bi-racial Captain has made one big decision for political oneness. He does not waver between backing the South Vietnamese government, with its American ally, in the war against communism, or backing the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese communists. He has chosen communism, and he works to further the cause of communism throughout the whole novel. But the job he has chosen—sleeper agent—forces him to lead a double life, be an actor perpetually playing a role: “sometimes I dreamed of trying to pull a mask off my face, only to realize that the mask was my face.” Now he knows how Vladimir Putin must feel. As we shall see, he also shares with Putin some views on American foreign policy.
The Captain’s story is intertwined with that of his two blood brothers, fast friends since childhood. One of them, Bon, whose father was murdered by the communists, is a staunch supporter of the South Vietnamese government. The other, Man, like The Captain, fights to liberate the country from the Americans and South Vietnamese. As the action begins, in 1975, Saigon is about to fall to the North Vietnamese troops, while the Americans and their allies—including Bon, The Captain, and The General, the man whom The Captain works for, and spies against—are in full flight back to the U.S.
A large part of the novel’s action is set in California in the seventies, where the expatriate Vietnamese military men end up, and where they plot to return home and overthrow the communists. The Captain goes on ostensibly working as aide to The General, while sending back coded messages to his handler Man in Vietnam. As the title tells us, he is a communist sympathizer. Then again, he professes sympathy as well for “the enemy”: “I confess that after having spent my whole life in their company I cannot help but sympathize with them, as I do with many others. My weakness for sympathizing with others has much to do with my status as bastard.” Later the General asks him, “Do you know what your problem is?” Like all people who ask that question, he answers it himself: “You’re too sympathetic.” As we learn in the final part of the book, the communists who have taken over Vietnam will tell him exactly the same thing.
Then again, the sympathizer is, at many points in the book, not very sympathetic at all. He is personally responsible for the murder of two innocent men in America, and later we learn that he is obliquely responsible for the murder of his own father. As in The Brothers Karamazov—mentioned by name in The Sympathizer—we have the theme of parricide. But even more to the point, Dostoevsky’s final novel airs out the theme of bifurcation and the theme of guilt. It turns out that we are all, to one degree or another, guilty, and that’s what Viet Thanh Nguyen is telling us as well. In the words of Claude, the CIA agent who trains the narrator in interrogation techniques, “Innocence and guilt. These are cosmic issues. We’re all innocent on one level and guilty on another. Isn’t that what Original Sin is all about?” The Captain’s blood brother Man, handler of his sleeper/spy activities, makes exactly the same point: “Of course men will die . . . . . But they aren’t innocent. Neither are we, my friend. We’re revolutionaries, and revolutionaries can never be innocent. We know too much and have done too much.”
This is a book about Original Sin, which receives frequent mention by the narrator, who is laden in his own mind with sin: “I was impure, and impurity was all I wanted and all I deserved.” Brought up as a Catholic, with his father, the priest, force-feeding him in the dogma of Catholicism as a boy, the Captain—now a professed atheist and communist—can’t totally shuck off his Catholic guilt. The two men he has murdered in the U.S. return to him as ghosts and haunt him on a daily basis.
For a book professing to be about Vietnam the theme of America is dominant. The Captain appears to both love and hate the U.S. simultaneously, and here we have another bifurcation. The whole book reeks with Anti-American thoughts and sentiments. “America, land of supermarkets and superhighways, of supersonic jets and Superman, of supercarriers and the Super Bowl! America, a country not content simply to give itself a name on its bloody birth, but one that insisted for the first time in history on a mysterious acronym, USA, a trifecta of letters outdone later only by the quartet of the USSR. Although every country thought itself superior in its own way, was there ever a country that coined so many ‘super’ terms from the federal bank of its narcissism, was not only superconfident but also truly superpowerful, that would not be satisfied until it locked every nation of the world into a full nelson and made it cry Uncle Sam?”
Understandably, The Captain cannot forgive the U.S. for coming to Vietnam to, ostensibly, save the country and then killing three million people and leaving, having saved nothing and nobody. Furthermore, he is rankled by the narrative of the war, perpetuated by Hollywood, which tells only of American glory. This is “the first war where the losers would write history instead of the victors, courtesy of the most efficient propaganda machine ever created” (Hollywood).
“Nothing was more American than wielding a gun and committing oneself to die for freedom and independence, unless it was wielding that gun to take away someone else’s freedom and independence.” Here we get into the issue of American exceptionalism and the self-appointed role of America as policeman of the world, which is Vladimir Putin’s primary beef with the U.S. today.
Resident in America, the General’s wife makes clear her opinion of the country that has given her shelter, stressing “the lewdness and the shallowness and the tawdriness Americans love so much.” After being given a hero’s welcome in the U.S.A. upon his expulsion from the Soviet Union, the writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn—to the chagrin of his freedom-loving hosts—made a series of such remarks in his speeches, and I have frequently heard Russian immigrants speaking in the same vein. American the Beautiful is often American the Ugly to them. Or America the Stupid. Looking for more endearments? Here are two others (in a book teeming with them): (1) “the Disneyland ideology followed by most Americans, that theirs was the happiest place on earth;” (2) “As the crapulent major said, A man doesn’t need balls in this country, Captain. The women all have their own.” As a life-long American, I read the plethora of criticisms in The Sympathizer and must admit, alas, their credibility. Even when The Captain asserts that it’s against the law to be unhappy in America. “If I was unhappy, it would reflect badly on me, for Americans saw unhappiness as a moral failure and thought crime.” Too true.
Finally, on page 280, the Captain—on his way out of the country and back to Vietnam—gets around to saying a few good things about the U.S.A. “I thought with regret about all the things I would miss about America: the TV dinner; air-conditioning; a well-regulated traffic system that people actually followed; a relatively low rate of death by gunfire, at least compared with our homeland; the modernist novel; freedom of speech, which, if not as absolute as Americans liked to believe, was still greater in degree than in our homeland; sexual liberation; and, perhaps most of all, that omnipresent American narcotic, optimism, the unending flow of which poured through the American mind continuously, whitewashing the graffiti of despair, rage, hatred, and nihilism scrawled there nightly by the black hoodlums of the unconscious.” Good writing there, but the whole book has sentences like that. Nice.
Then again, the novel is about human bifurcation, so it is only natural that the narrator who hates America also to some degree loves America. In the latter part of the book he arrives back in his homeland, in the company of a group of former South Vietnamese soldiers trying to establish a foothold for a new anti-communist revolution. They are captured by the communists, and now comes the greatest irony in the novel. The sleeper agent, who has worked tirelessly in aid of communism, is not received with open arms. He is stuck into a re-education labor camp, where he is given the opportunity to write a confession, in an effort to purify his soul—badly tainted by Western culture. To do, in effect, the impossible: re-educate himself out of his double nature.
That confession, prepared for the commandant of the camp, comprises the first 307 pages of the book. In the eyes of the communist true believers the Captain’s manuscript is blasphemy. Too many good things, it seems, have been said about the West, too much complexity pervades the pages, no revolutionary slogans have been voiced, even beloved Uncle Ho Chi Minh is mentioned but once. The Captain, so it turns out, is too complicated to be a true revolutionary. True revolutionaries oversimply life’s realities—wiping out all the grays and making them into blacks and whites. But the Captain in his bifurcation is the epitome of gray. Here’s a hypothetical dialogue between him and the commandant.
--Okay, who are you?
--Me, myself, and I.
--Right. You are you yourself and you, but you’re not allowed to be all those. Choose one.
--But how can I choose between me, myself, and me? If I do that, I won’t be truly me, myself, and I anymore.
--Choose!
(Actually, it’s somewhat easier for the Captain—but still impossible—he has to choose only between me and myself.)
What is the first thing that the Grand Socialist Revolution always has to do? Kill off the intellectuals, for the Revolution wants people chanting slogans, but certainly not thinking. “I believed in these slogans,” says the Captain, “but I could not bring myself to write them.” Not really true. He does not believe in the simpleminded slogans of Socialism. He is too intelligent to be a believer in the revolution, and deep down he senses why the Socialist Revolution never works. Revolutionaries think they know something that is really unknowable: who “the people” are for whom they fight. “Like salmon that instinctively knew when to swim upstream, we all knew who the people were and who were not the people. Anyone who had to be told who the people were was not [could not be] one of the people.” The Captain, deep down, is an intellectual, one of those stubborn, reactionary types who will tell you the truth: the whole idea of “the people” is a vast oversimplification and a fraud. Nothing on earth is really black or white; everything is gray. And “Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,” as Emerson is quoted in this book as saying.
At the end of the book the Captain is put through the same torture methods that the CIA once taught him way back when: sensory deprivation and sleep deprivation. He must learn the error of his ways and be, finally, re-educated to become a true Socialist believer. Of course, the bifurcated man cannot be put back together; he will always be what Dostoevsky’s hero is in “Notes from the Underground”: the man with the disease of hyper-consciousness, he who sees the many sides of any issue, too intelligent for his own good. The main thing he has learned through a lifetime of experience as a sleeper agent is that when the French left, and then when the Americans left, the Vietnamese were not finished with being given the shaft; they began “f….ing themselves now.” Even the narrator’s blood brother Man, the most intelligent character and, at one time, a true believer, ultimately comes to the conclusion that the revolution has failed.
Like Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, The Captain, for all of his apparent efforts to work his way out of his bifurcation, is the eternal rebel, whose allegations that his doubleness dooms him to an alien life are not that believable. He assumes that, as half breed, marriage has been denied to him for all time. But certainly in America—with his excellent knowledge of English and American mores—he could make a marriage if he wished. Bastardy hardly limits one in the U.S., where huge numbers of children are born out of wedlock, and where The Captain could function well in a miscegenated society. Why does he not consider such a move? Because he loves his loneliness, he adores his status as misfit, he revels in the alienation. Incapable of love for anyone but his now dead mother and his three blood brothers, he has no desire to make any accommodation with a woman.
In a kind of deus ex machina ending, Man, now a communist commissar, arranges for the Captain and Bon to escape from Vietnam with the boat people. Even if they survive the journey, we wonder where they will end up. The Captain has burned his bridges in the U.S., having committed a murder (of the character Sonny) just before leaving the country. He will be the prime suspect in that murder, so he cannot return to the beloved/hated U.S. At the end of the novel the man in limbo finds himself in even a physical liminality: he is the eternal displaced person, with no country to call home.
The Sympathizer is full of so many brilliantly written passages that you feel like quoting everything in full. The author has a way of writing set scenes with a mass of accumulated detail. Here are selections from a long passage describing the many fates of the Vietnamese immigrants in the U.S.: “the naïve girl who flew to Spokane to marry her GI sweetheart and was sold to a brothel, and the widower with nine children who went out into a Minnesotan winter and lay down in the snow on his back with mouth open until he was buried and frozen, and the ex-Ranger who bought a gun and dispatched his wife and two children before killing himself in Cleveland, . . . . . and the devout Buddhist who spanked his young son and was arrested for child abuse in Houston, and the proprietor who accepted food stamps for chopsticks and was fined for breaking the law in San Jose, and the husband who slapped his wife and was jailed for domestic violence in Raleigh, . . . . . and the half dozen who went to sleep in a crowded, freezing room in Terre Haute with a charcoal brazier for heat and never woke up, borne to permanent darkness on an invisible cloud of carbon monoxide.”
The above passage goes on for a full two pages, and, eventually, grades into the success stories: “the story of a baby orphan adopted by a Kansas billionaire, or the mechanic who bought a lottery ticket in Arlington and became a multimillionaire, or the girl elected president of her high school class in Baton Rouge, or the boy accepted by Harvard from Fond du Lac.” The whole long riff ends as follows: “So it was that we soaped ourselves in sadness and we rinsed ourselves with hope, and for all that we believed almost every rumor we heard, almost all of us refused to believe that our nation was dead.”
Another wonderful passage describes The Captain’s visit to the home of a Hollywood director, where—after finally breaking his way through the conceited director’s monologue, he delivers a forceful lecture on a subject dear to his heart: how the Vietnamese scream.
“Screams are not universal, I said. If I took this telephone cord and wrapped it around your neck and pulled it tight until your eyes bugged out and your tongue turned black, Violet’s scream [Violet is the director’s assistant] would sound very different from the scream you would be trying to make. Those are two very different kinds of terror coming from a man and a woman. The man knows he is dying. The woman fears she is likely to die soon. Their situations and their bodies produce a qualitatively different timbre to their voices. One must listen to them carefully to understand that while pain is universal, it is also utterly private.”
The power of the above passage is reinforced when The Captain tells us what he was thinking as he impressed the words upon the fatuous director. “I stood up and leaned on the desk to look right into his eyes. But I didn’t see him. What I saw was the face of the wiry Montagnard, an elder of the Bru minority who lived in an actual hamlet not far from the setting of this fiction. Rumor had it that he served as a liaison agent for the Viet Cong. I was on my first assignment as a lieutenant and could not figure out a way to save the man from my captain wrapping a strand of rusted barbed wire around his throat, the necklace tight enough so that each time he swallowed, the wire tickled his Adam’s apple. That was not what made the old man scream, however. It was just the appetizer. In my mind, though, as I watched the scene, I screamed for him.
“Here’s what it sounds like, I said, reaching across the desk to pick up the Auteur’s Montblanc fountain pen. I wrote onomatopoeically across the cover page of the screenplay in big black letters: AIEYAAHHHH!!! Then I capped his pen, put it back on his leather writing pad, and said, That’s how we scream in my country.”
The author has a wonderful feel for the way human psychology works. In the scene describing how The Captain murders the innocent Sonny, there is a suggestion that deep in the neurons of his brain Sonny realizes the danger he is in, but the neurons cannot get the full message to his conscious mind in time. Flustered at the Captain’s admission that he is a sleeper agent, Sonny suggests that the General has put him up to coming here—the General has done so, but he has put out a contract on Sonny’s life. Sonny even once uses the word “kill”: “I think you’ve come here to trick me. You want me to say I’m a communist too, so you can kill me or expose me, don’t you?”
The novel is a bit weaker at the end, where it describes the Captain’s return to Vietnam and his interment in a labor camp for “re-education.” The author, although by birth Vietnamese, has barely ever been in his home country and must make up nearly everything in this part. Consequently, the reader must do a good deal of “suspending disbelief” in the latter pages of the novel. The business about how Man insists on torturing his friend until The Captain understands the meaning of the word “Nothing” is much belabored and, ultimately, unconvincing. Then again, we are expected to believe that by the time we read it, the manuscript (the first 307 pp.) has already been through three drafts, which are redacted by the commandant of the camp. I see little evidence of the viewpoint of a true-believing communist in that manuscript part of the book. One more thing: what language is the ms written in, Vietnamese or English? It is so thoroughly steeped in the English language that one has trouble imagining it written in Vietnamese for the eyes of the commandant. More heavy suspension of disbelief.
A few passages would be wonderful, were they not so suggestive of other Western writers. Take the masturbation scene: “I committed my first unnatural act at thirteen with a gutted squid purloined from my mother’s kitchen.” The story of the love affair with the squid goes on for two pages, and would be more entertaining were not the whole business purloined from Roth’s Portnoy. Once in a while a line sounds like it might have come out of Mickey Spillane, or from Garrison Keillor in the role of Guy Noir: “Her legs demanded to be looked at, and would not take no, non, nein, nyet, or even maybe for an answer.” Then again, the Captain can be quite an innocent for a military man; even though he himself carried a .38 special back in Vietnam, he is unaware that the weapon accommodates five cartridges, not six, as we are told in the novel.
These are mere quibbles, not meant to detract from the brilliance of the novel on the whole. Although the writer has a Vietnamese name, he is, essentially an American, having come to this country at age four. The novel, as well, is set firmly in the tradition of the Western novel. To what extent it may also be in the tradition of the Asian novel, I do not know, as I confess my ignorance of Asian literature. It would be interesting to hear how this book goes over in Vietnam, after it is translated into Vietnamese and published there. You kind of wonder if the Vietnamese reaction might be like the commandant’s reaction to The Captain’s confession: too mired in Western ways, too “American” in its viewpoints. And that would be still one more grand irony.
To return one last time to Dostoevsky, the ending of The Sympathizer reminds me somewhat of the ending of Crime and Punishment. In that novel we are left with the author’s nudging hard at his recalcitrant, atheistic Raskolnikov, with the aid of the unbelievably saintly Sonya, pushing him over into the camp of Russian Orthodox faith, but not quite getting him pushed there. The split-personality “hero” of C and P—so we are told—has made strides forward, but has certainly not yet resolved his split or atoned for having committed murder. It would take another long novel, writes Dostoevsky in the final pages, to describe Raskolnikov’s true religious transformation and healing. Of course, that sequel novel was never written. In his turn, the author of The Sympathizer has mentioned in interviews that he has considered writing a sequel to his novel. He has not suggested, however, that the bifurcated Captain has a chance to resolve his split. Not likely.
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HT
4.0 out of 5 stars A story about the Vietnam War told from one Vietnamese to anotherReviewed in the United States on 22 October 2016
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he protagonist in this novel about the fall of South Vietnam is a divided person and that division makes him an ouytsider and gives him an interesting viewpoint. He is physically divided because his mother is Vietnamese while is absent father was a French Catholic priest who did not claim him. This division held him up to derision by his classmates and even his aunts who treat him terribly. He is divided because although he serves in the South Vietnamese military in charge of tracking and arresting dissidents, he is in fact a North Vietnamese spy. Through it all he sees his divided and alienated self: "I was divided, tormented body below, placid consciousness floating high above." [Loc 5316]
The novel starts as Saigon is in the final stages of its fall to North Vietnam. Because he is well connected with a general (to whom he is an aide) he is able to escape to America where he sets up a new life in the refugee community and still reports to his superior in Vietnam. In order to protect his cover he is forced to murder suspected (incorrectly) of being North Vietnamese spies. Eventually he returns to Vietnam (through Laos) as part of a "liberation army" although he has shared the details with his superior so the foray is met with disaster. The final section of the novel has him trapped in a "re-education camp" where he is subjected to the same treatment he inflicted on others as part of his fellow communists earlier in his career.
Despite the divided-ness and being an outsider he is blood brothers with two others who unbeknownst to each other are on opposite sides.
Through it all we see the pain and damage inflicted on Vietnam from the viewpoint of the Vietnamese. Many of the refugees were brave men during the war but they lived in the "moldering ... stale air of subsidized apartments as their testes shriveled day by day, consumed by the metastasizing cancer called assimilation and susceptible to the hypochondria of exile." [Loc 1458]
One of his jobs in America was an aide to a movie about the war, directed by "the auteur". His goal was to help give it some flavor of the lives of the Vietnamese; he inevitably failed. "I naively believed that I cold divert the Hollywood organism from its goal, the simultaneous lobotomization and pickpocketing of the world's audiences. The ancillary benefit was strip-mining history, leaving the real history in the tunnels along with the dead, doing out tiny sparkling diamonds for audiences to gasp over."[Loc 2090]
As an outsider he sees that "nothing was more American than wielding a gun and committing oneself to die for freedom and independence, unless it was wielding that gun to take away someone else's freedom and independence."[Loc 3313]
Nguyen writes some beautiful passages in the book. His description of the difference between Nancy Sinatra and a Vietnamese performer singing "Bang Bang" is beautiful. "To [Nancy Sinatra] those were bubble-gum pop lyrics. Bang bang was the soundtrack of our lives." [Loc 3605] The performance showed that depth of feeling.
There are also some quite humorous sections, such as "she cursed me at such length and with such inventiveness I had to check both my watch and my dictionary." [Loc 3470].
This novel is an excellent telling of the Vietnamese story from the outsider's perspective - outsiders to the American war there - outsiders even though the protagonist was in the middle of it. We come to see that this novel is being told by one Vietnamese to another. The alienation is strengthened by the fact that we learn very few names. We know the names of the protagonists two blood brothers, but not his own name - or the name of his South Vietnamese boss, "the general" or another refugee simply known as "the crapulent major" or the director of the movie.
I've read the past four Pulitzer Prize winners in fiction; this was my least favorite, but certainly an excellent novel. While this is in fact a very good novel, I think the subject matter - a new view of the Vietnam War, and a view of American military actions around the world since the end of World War II - helped elevate it to the prize.
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Ron K
5.0 out of 5 stars NOT Another Vietnam War BookReviewed in the United States on 20 May 2016
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This is not just another Vietnam War novel; on the surface it may look like one with the additional twist that the protagonist is a sleeper agent for North Vietnam hiding inside the Vietnamese refugee population in the USA. The reality and appeal of this novel is much more complex. The entire novel could be read with a focus on the innovative language use, from vocabulary to structure. This alone would be enough to please a reader jaded by overused vocabulary and prose in novels currently “hot.” But this book is more.
There is a substantial ghost story. Not that this is a work of fantasy; it is an acknowledgement that ghosts have a significant part in the belief system of Vietnamese. As an Occidental with a Vietnamese wife, I had a great deal of difficulty in dealing with the significance seriously; my failing to do so is somewhat described by the narrator (hereafter referred to as the Captain) as one of many failings of Occidentals who would understand Asians. The Captain has more problems than my mindset, though. He has killed a few people, some maybe innocent, others perhaps guilty. His victims return in unpredictable visits at sometimes embarrassing times and are always asking questions that cause the Captain to doubt himself.
There is a very realistic portrayal of interrogation techniques, mostly at the strategic level (lasting a long time) but even strategic interrogations have elements of tactical (short term) interrogations. Strange music played loudly, sleep deprivation, temporal confusion; all are elements discussed. Reading this after former experiences with interrogation, these sections were riveting for me. And accurate. The only other honest description of a strategic interrogation I have read was written by John Le Carre in some of his Smiley adventures. Those accurate descriptions were Eurocentric.
The big theme running through the novel is about the Captain’s struggle to establish a self-identity. He resents, throughout the book, being called a bastard. I could not identify with the depths of such resentment; it came up repeatedly in many of the subplot developments. The Captain is a result of a relationship between a French priest and an under-aged Vietnamese girl. Bullied in school, the Captain began to fight, literally, against being called a bastard. Arriving in the US on his mission, he fought to be called Eurasian rather than Amerasian, which many in the US would unthinkingly call him. Then there was the idea that he was a sleeper agent in the US working for the North Vietnamese communists while pretending to subscribe to the beliefs of the defeated, refugee military remnants. In addition to the emotional dualities he felt, there were the pragmatic dualities he had to live with in order to do his job. The Captain spent so much time trying to rationalize varied identities that he never had time to figure out what his end goal personality was.
There is a military story for the war veterans among us, especially toward the latter part of the book. Some of this does not ring true as realistic. A bunch of over the hill military types who had done little for years other than as domestic workers decide to get together, run around in the desert a bit to get into shape, then run to Thailand to buy some weapons so they could begin invading their homeland in a recovery of past days and glories. Talk about a condescending attitude!! Clue: The opposition was on guard for such things.
Culture clash, along with a search for self-identity, appear throughout the story. Rudyard Kipling is quoted as that author notes the impossibility of a reconciliation or a meeting between East and West. Two other excellent writers are noted; Joseph Buttinger and his several books on Vietnam and Francis Fitzgerald with her one controversial prize winner, Fire in the Lake. Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke is not mentioned. That book and this one could be a companion series on views of the war. They are both great, but in different ways.
As a frequent reader, I love language and the clever use of language; this book rates very high for me in terms of language, both vocabulary and structure. I had to resort to Kindle dictionary definitions for cordillera, villanelles, apsara, palimpsest, and chiaroscuro; all gave me pause. I probably need to get out more. And then there were the impossibly long sentences; one I counted was 360 words. Sprinkled liberally with commas and semicolons, the sentences were technically good. They usually happened when the Captain was entering a spell of reminiscence. And here the reader is invited to follow the path remembered by the Captain. If the reader has had any involvement with Vietnam, the reading of these passages will be slow as reader memories return. These memories can be (as they were for me) quite emotional. I provide one here as an example. It describes the stories Vietnamese refugees heard about the ultimate fate of some of their countrymen who did not do well in the USA.
"This was the way we learned of the clan turned into slave labor by a farmer in Modesto, and the naive girl who flew to Spokane to marry her GI sweetheart and was sold to a brothel, and the widower with nine children who went out into a Minnesotan winter and lay down in the snow on his back with mouth open until he was buried and frozen, and the ex-Ranger who bought a gun and dispatched his wife and two children before killing himself in Cleveland, and the regretful refugees on Guam who petitioned to go back to our homeland, never to be heard from again, and the spoiled girl seduced by heroin who disappeared into the Baltimore streets, and the politician’s wife demoted to cleaning bedpans in a nursing home who one day snapped, attacked her husband with a kitchen knife, then was committed to a mental ward, and the quartet of teenagers who arrived without families and fell in together in Queens, robbing two liquor stores and killing a clerk before being imprisoned for twenty years to life, and the devout Buddhist who spanked his young son and was arrested for child abuse in Houston, and the proprietor who accepted food stamps for chopsticks and was fined for breaking the law in San Jose, and the husband who slapped his wife and was jailed for domestic violence in Raleigh, and the men who had escaped but left wives behind in the chaos, and the women who had escaped but left husbands behind, and the children who had escaped without parents and grandparents, and the families missing one, two, three, or more children, and the half dozen who went to sleep in a crowded, freezing room in Terre Haute with a charcoal brazier for heat and never woke up, borne to permanent darkness on an invisible cloud of carbon monoxide."
And this is only one such sentence. There are several. The two reference points below are to account for the fact that the quote ran over two Kindle “pages.”
Nguyen, Viet Thanh. The Sympathizer: A Novel (Kindle Locations 1272-1278). Grove/Atlantic, Inc.. Kindle Edition.
Nguyen, Viet Thanh. The Sympathizer: A Novel (Kindle Locations 1278-1283). Grove/Atlantic, Inc.. Kindle Edition.
Therefore, take the time to read and experience the book. I do not believe it is a one weekend read.
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Paul Frandano
4.0 out of 5 stars For Better and Worse, Overwriting Alternates with Brilliance and Emotional PowerReviewed in the United States on 17 August 2017
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I went through phases of the moon with this ultimately absorbing, intelligent, richly imaginative novel. Some novels hook you on the first page. Not for me this one; I found connecting with it difficult, even given my identification with the first observations our unnamed Vietnamese narrator makes about himself in the text of a written confession to the 'Commandant": "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 simply able to see any issue from both sides" - this last perhaps being the prime characteristic of a "sympathizer," a sympathetic person in general, in several senses of that noun.
Nevertheless, for the first 60 pages or so, I remained on the fence, unhooked. Eventually, Viet Thanh Nguyen's poetic voice started to sink in, to mesmerize, and he strung out a series of particularly euphonious metaphors and impressions that culminated in a passage that literally rocked me like a particularly well-turned Leonard Cohen lyric, the cumulative effect of which was to lock me in, absolutely.
The story swept me forward, with a sense that "I'm reading not just a good book but almost certainly a great one" that continued for another 150 pages or so, when the propulsive force of Nguyen's story began to wane. I began to feel somewhat ground down by his - or his narrator's - piling on of trope after trope, relentlessly, enthusiastically, hyperimaginatively, somewhat deliriously, almost frantically, and - a bad word - preciously overwriting, straining for literary effects, ostensibly for their own sake.
And then I hit this passage, which occurs during a tense, awkward, alchohol-assisted three-way conversation in which each participant was embarrassed and the tipsy narrator increasingly angry: a genuine howler that made me stop, look up from the page, and sigh - "It was time to stop and make a graceful exit, but the vodka that could not drain fast enough through the plugged-up sinkhole in the basement of my heart compelled me to swim on."
The words pinged off my internal ear like bullets off a skillet. I remained exhausted and exasperated by Nguyen's superabundant prose for the next hundred pages or so, but elements of my own story - Vietnam-era vet, graduate work in East Asian Communism, a career in intelligence, and my love of imaginative writing - made this book a natural for me, and it's subtext of who- or what-done-it? that caused our spy/narrator to wind up in a North Vietnamese (I supposed, without being certain) prison camp, writing a "confession," kept me moving forward. (For what it's worth, once I'd finished the novel, I decided that, with near certainty, Nguyen's overwriting was less for stylistic reasons than for plot driven ones. The ostensibly Western style of the unnamed narrator's confession becomes a topic of narrative interest.)
Key plot elements simply didnt work for me. A murder, a wooing, and, ultimately, one of the narrator's blood-friendships just didn't strike me as plausible. Even so, on balance, I think much more of the novel succeeds on its own terms. The Philippines movie for which the narrator serves as technical advisor - which Nguyen wrote as Vietnamese payback for Apocalypse Now - seemed more like Platoon: "the Thesbian" might of course have been Brando, but there was no mad Kurtz or menacing trip up the Mekong, just bloody., destructive war but was nevertheless a great sequence, as were depictions of the myriad routine adjustments of the expat community to their new lives and their keen longing for their "Old Country," which, in my own 3rd generation immigrant-family experience, neither my parents, nor my Polish grandparents (although I have no sense of how my Italian grandparent, long dead by the time I was born, regarded the Italy they left in the late 19th century), nor the immigrant or 2nd Gen American parents of friends and relatives, seemed to miss.
In the end, despite a long middle stretch that dragged a bit, I tore through most of the novel and easily recommend it for its strongly sympatheic account of dislocated Vietnamese in America, its powerful POW camp depictions, and its all too plausible political intelligence yarn.
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