Winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction Winner of the 2016 Edgar Award for Best First Novel Winner of the 2016 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction “[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 . . . The nameless … previously voiceless . . . 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 Carré. . . . 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 (cover review)
The winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, as well as seven other awards, The Sympathizer is the breakthrough novel of the year. With the pace and suspense of a thriller and prose that has been compared to Graham Greene and Saul Bellow, The Sympathizer is a sweeping epic of love and betrayal. The narrator, a communist double agent, is a “man of two minds,” a half-French, half-Vietnamese army captain who arranges to come to America after the Fall of Saigon, and while building a new life with other Vietnamese refugees in Los Angeles is secretly reporting back to his communist superiors in Vietnam. The Sympathizer is a blistering exploration of identity and America, a gripping espionage novel, and a powerful story of love and friendship.
more
Viet Thanh Nguyen is the master of the simile. This book is nothing if not beautiful, with metaphors that I would roll around on my tongue and savor, turns of phrase expertly basted in irony or bleak humor before served on a platter with a side of brutality and an entree of insightful truism with a wry sprinkle of profundity on top. This isn’t just a war story or an espionage story or a Vietnam story or a refugee story; it’s a sweeping tale of culture clash and friendship and the tragedy of the human existence.
I confess my understanding of the Vietnam war to be murky. This novel doesn’t set out to explain that chapter of history, but it did shine a light into some rather dark places. Even though I was prepared for violence starting in chapter one, I found a scene at the end massively disturbing. Despite this, I think the book is excellent and should make it onto everyone’s reading lists. Highly recommend.
It took me a while to get into The Sympathizer. I read it in bits and pieces, and the story wasn’t strong enough to pull me through. But about 100 pages into the book it started to surprise me. Characters revealed sides I didn’t expect, satire surfaced, and I found it changing some of my long-held perspectives on the world. For me, that last bit is some of the highest praise I can give a book.
This is a disturbing book, beautifully written, as well as shocking.
It opens in Saigon in April 1975 in the villa of a General of the South Vietnamese army. His right hand man, the Captain, unbeknownst to the General and anyone else is an undercover Vietcong agent. In the chaos of defeat, the Captain, the General and numerous others flee Vietnam and make it to America where the Captain continues his spying activity. The Captain finds himself in a dilemma and the opening lines hook you in. “I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces… I am simply able to see any issue from both sides.”
Reading this gripping Pulitzer Prize winning novel, I felt the constant tug of being in two minds. The Captain is the son of a peasant woman and a French priest which makes for an unhealthy start in life as he is ridiculed and treated as an outsider, eternally in conflict.
Having watched movies and read about the Vietnam War, it has only ever been from a Western point of view. This novel paints a very different picture. In America, the Captain is assigned the job of being a cultural adviser to the director of a movie about the war which we soon realise is Apocalypse Now.
“An audience member might love or hate this Movie, or dismiss it as only a story, but those emotions are irrelevant. What mattered was that the audience member, having paid for a ticket, was willing to let American ideas and values seep into the vulnerable tissue of his brain and the absorbent soil of his heart.”
There are many side observations like this throughout the narrative which makes the reader think and reflect. There are also moments of pure comedy bordering on the ludicrous which is an antidote to the horror of what people are forced to do during a war. The Captain’s torment grows with the ghost of deeds done past and present.
The first half of this book pummels you along, the middle is reflective and as times slow with the end almost unbearable to read. Yet it is an important book for all sides of politics and philosophies.
Put this one your list.
“The Sympathizer” is an award-winning novel by Viet Thanh Nguyen. It was published in 2015 by Grove Press. The novel won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, an Edgar Award for Best First Novel, and more.
The novel is a tale of displaced loyalties, betrayals, and deceit. There is a cost due for all of these things, and the costs must be paid. Secret lives are lived out, and secret pasts are kept hidden away.
This dark and complex story begins with the fall of Saigon during the Vietnam War. A Vietnamese General is drawing up a precious list, the list of who will be allowed to escape the besieged city. The armies of North Vietnam are closing in. Those loyal to the fallen cause of the Americans must either flee or remain. To remain is to face reeducation camps, or worse. The list being compiled by the General is life itself to a lucky few. But there is a spy in the room, a trusted Captain. That Captain is our protagonist.
The story shifts to the Vietnamese refugee community in the United States. The lucky few have begun to settle into their new lives, but the War is not over. Old loyalties, and old treacheries, are still in play. Old battles are still being fought below the surface of daily lives in this new land. The events of the novel build to an ill-fated return, and a long awaited confrontation.
“The Sympathizer” will appeal to different readers at different levels. It is an epic spy novel, full of intrigue, double-dealers, and deceit. For the politically-minded reader, it is a tale of colliding politics and cultures. Woven through all of this is a story of binding friendship and love. I highly recommend this dark and compelling novel.
Post-Viet Nam War’s tragedy continues in this spy vs. spy novel.
This was a well-written, intimate portrait of one man’s life as a North Vietnamese Spy while living among the South Vietnamese people and serving as an assistant to a high-ranking South Vietnamese General. It starts in the final days of the war in Vietnam and continues in America as the escapees build new lives as refugees while planning to restart the war. It was too depressing for me to finish. Too many awful things happened and I did not want to read about them.
This is a powerful and gut wrenching book about spies in the VIetnam war, who become refugees in America before going back to their homeland. The writing is masterful and thrilling.
If this book was supposed to have humor in it, it was totally lost on me. Irrational murders of fellow country men? Not my cup of tea.
I fell in love with the use of vocabulary at first; then, it became daunting and tiresome. The characters were well developed. Complex meaningful story.
An amazing view of the tragic events of America’s ill conceived attempt at nation building during the Cold War era, from the perspective of a Vietnamese double agent, who is among the last to leave Saigon as South Vietnam falls to the Communists. I’m just a dabbler in that war’s history, but this story captures those events with great wit, unsettling irony, and a tragic sense of the human condition.
Pulitzer Prize winner!
Truly, one of the best books I’ve read. A biting satire couched in the form of a spy novel recounting a crucial era in our history from a perspective we’ve criminally ignored.
Brilliant book. It is written in a dry, ironic style, with long paragraphs without dialogue, and I can understand why this is not to everyone’s taste. But it offers profound insights into the Vietnam War, the Vietnamese refugee community, and the ‘reeducation’ camps in Vietnam after the war. By using an unnamed first-person protagonist, and giving most of the characters sardonic descriptors instead of names: the “General”, the “affectless lieutenant”, the “crapulent major”, the “grizzled captain”, the author both creates a certain distance and generalizes the story. The novel manages to be both hysterically funny at times and really gruesome in places – a few murder and rape scenes which I just had to skip over, they were so disturbing. But this is an important book, well worth the read.
This is a challenging book, the only story I know of that looks at the Vietnam War from the unique viewpoint of a conflicted communist sympathizer. A South Vietnamese general and his compatriots flee Vietnam start a new life in Los Angeles, unaware that one of them, the captain, is secretly observing and reporting on the group to the Viet Cong, a man who went to university in America but returned to Vietnam to fight for the Communist cause.
The writing is intricate and the voice of the anonymous narrator is chillingly distant and even ominous at times… as I said, not an easy book, but an important and challenging one.
What do you call that moment when you’re jussssssst about to quit a book and half-looking for a reason to keep going? You’re in the quicksand. You’re on page 36 and you want to chuck it but your arms are frantically flailing for jungle vines. Looking for some reason to keep going. Well, thank goodness I found a jungle vine just as I was about to quit this debut novel about Vietnamese refugees coming to America after the Vietnam War. The vine was this New York Times Op-Ed called “Our Vietnam War Never Ended” by the author. Go read it! So much emotion and anger and pain. And it made me understand what was below the surface of this absurdist, urgent, and tragic tale. Once the curtains of The Sympathizer are pulled back it opens into one of the sharpest, funniest, and most epic literary masterpieces I have read. And I guess I’m not alone since it has the most book trophies I’ve ever seen slapped inside a cover including Pulitzer Prize, Carnegie Medal, NYT Top 100 Notable Books, the Edgar Award, and a finalist for the PEN / Faulkner.
The Viet Nam War was a wildly unpopular war, one that completely divided our nation. I have never read books on the Vietnamese perspective. The Sympathizer is a very dark read that examines both the Viet Cong Communist perspective and the perspective of those that were supported and fought side-by-side with the USA. The hero of the book is a man divided in every way. He is half French thanks to his father a priest who seduced his mother, who was a young Vietnamese girl at a missionary school. With one foot in two different worlds, he is never comfortable or accepted by either. He has spent the better part of his adulthood as a Viet Cong mole (enemy covert agent) working as an aide to a general in the South Vietnamese army. With a U.S. university education, he has a rare insight into the western mind and world. All of this factor into his ability to “sympathize” with both sides.
The book opens in the closing days of the Viet Nam War, illuminating those last frantic hours when the U.S. pulled out of Saigon, taking with them as many of their Vietnamese allies (of course not enough) as the planes could hold. The Captain, as the hero is referred to throughout the book, is ordered by his Viet Cong handler, one of his childhood best friends, to continue spying on the General in the U.S.
The Sympathizer examines the consequences of not only colonialism, which created the Viet Nam that existed just prior to the war, and the restrictive and destructive effects of communism and its annihilation of the individual in favor of the communal. When the U.S. pulled out of Viet Nam it reneged on its promise to support and carry through the war until Viet Nam could emerge as a free, democratic, nation. We abandoned the country and left those that fought with us to fend for themselves, which resulted in massacres, and horrific re-education camps, and the desperate attempts of thousands of people to try and escape by boats (the infamous boat people).
The book also examines the difficulty of absorbing a large community of foreigners into the fold of the United States, particularly when you are trying to forget a war that was so terribly unpopular. These Vietnamese immigrants were a visible reminder of something everyone was trying to forget. War. This only compounded their alienation from the communities they lived in.
In the end, the Captain returns on a suicide mission to Viet Nam as he tries to protect his other best friend Bon who is sent by the General to renew efforts to take their country back from the Viet Cong. Bon and the Captain are captured and taken to a re-education camp where they undergo tortures that make waterboarding seem like a fun sport.
This is an amazing read. It is an examination of not only the psychology and futility of war but the results of both good intentions and the ugly reality of communism. Even with all the books criticism of American foreign policy and of America itself, you will come away from it appreciating every flaw and imperfection that permeate the American experiment in democracy.
Terrific story. A very different viewpoint of a horrible conflict.
Viet Thanh Nguyen gives us a twisted, sometimes absurd (and absurdly funny) narrative about a North Vietnamese spy embedded with a fleeing South Vietnamese General and company. The book is, by turns, an immigrant’s story, a soldier’s story, and a seeker’s story. The unnamed narrator, himself a mixed-race victim of colonial French influence, is torn among many worlds. Sense of duty, sense of identity, sense of culture and sense of Human Nature are all thrown into question as he plods his way down paths others have made for him. An educated Army Captain by training (with help from the CIA), he takes marching orders from his professor, the exiled General, and a filmmaker. The most disastrous results come, of course, from the two things he chooses to do for himself.
Though “The Sympathizer” won’t leave you with a great feeling about either the Human Condition or about America’s involvement in the Vietnam War, it certainly provides perspective and enlightenment on both subjects. A fantastic read!
Pulitzer Prize winner with incredible use of the English language. The Vietnam war from a very different perspective. Fascinsting book…
Unique, informative, great writing, took me totally by surprise. One of the best reads I’ve experienced in a long time!