The Sympathizer
Ratings132
Average rating4
15
Ratings132
Average rating4
The novel, The Sympathizer, begins in April 1975, as Saigon is about to fall to communist invasion. Soon enough it does, and the war is over. Or is it?
Black comedy, historical novel, and literary thriller, The Sympathizer follows a nameless spy who has infiltrated the South Vietnamese army and flees with its remnants to America. His mission: report on their efforts to continue their lost war. As the aide to a general who refuses to admit defeat, he observes the struggles of the Vietnamese refugees to survive in a melancholic Los Angeles. Among them, the general believes, are communist agents. So our spy’s double life continues, hunting communists while helping the general organize a covert army. Their mission: to invade Vietnam and take it back.
Neither America nor a double life is new to our narrator. He is Eurasian, his father a French priest, his mother Vietnamese. He has been a double agent since his teenage years, and in his college years, he studied in California, the better to learn American culture. His war is a psychological one, but as he slowly realizes, much of that war is fought within himself, a man in between races and countries. As he tells us from the beginning: I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces. Perhaps not surprisingly, I am also a man of two minds.
Featured Series
2 primary booksThe Sympathizer is a 2-book series with 2 primary works first released in 2015 with contributions by Viet Thanh Nguyen.
Reviews with the most likes.
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 tried really hard with this one and just couldn't get invested in the story. It was poetically written I guess, but my GOD was I bored out of my mind!!!!!!!!!! For a story about spies and espionage where was the action?????
This one put me right to sleep.
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