The Sympathizer

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.

“All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

4.5 stars

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.)

Review to come.

Let me start by summarizing—with some creative license—conversations I had with a friend before and after I read this book. Reading Asian-American writers as an Asian-American reader is tricky because there are so few of them and the burden of representation so great. When you have spent your whole life knowing that you both are and are not, how do you create without stepping outside your art, weighing it from the perspective of someone understands neither? How do you do justice to your roots (no less beloved despite existing worlds and generations away) and to your country (no less a home despite the antagonism, occasionally mutual) without steamrolling altogether the story you are trying to tell? There is so much I could say about “The Sympathizer,” which, about two chapters in, cemented itself as one of my favorite novels ever, so let me leave it at this: it uses the humanity of its characters as a starting point, not a case to be proved, and everything that followed is all I have ever wanted from fiction.

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.

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

• 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 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.

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.

I feel bad saying this, but I found this book kind of a slog.

The good
The plot is brilliantly structured: our (first person) narrator is a secret agent of the Communist northern Vietnamese forces, embedded with a general in the southern army, during the last days of the Vietnam War. We open with the fall of Saigon, follow the fleeing southern forces to LA, where they continue fighting the war in the diaspora, assisted (and manipulated?) by American CIA operatives, with assassinations, plots and guerilla intrigues.

There's a clever meta-commentary woven throughout the book: the duplicity and dualism of Orientalism's take on “the East” vs. “the West”, of subjugation and racism and power, of capitalism vs. communism, coupled with a mixed race protagonist who's playing both sides. At the same time, as this book makes points about the lack of Vietnamese representation in the narrative of the Vietnam War (e.g. in a brilliant sequence when the protagonist assists a Francis Ford Coppola-stand-in directing his Apocalypse Now), this book itself is one of the few (only?) books about the Vietnam War written by a Vietnamese-American author for an American audience. Just like the protagonist tries (and fails) to shape the narrative to include more Vietnamese voices in the fictional film, so is Viet Thanh Nguyen clearly writing with that in mind with this book.

There's even more duality and layers which I admired: when the play-within-the-play film features (further) meta-meditations on duality and representation (with surviving southern soldiers, now refugees, are cast as extras portraying dying Viet Cong), we have the same events happening later in the ‘real life' of the book (and our fiction). There's even a bit towards the end, when the narrator has fully embraced his split/dual nature, when the writing becomes full of groan-inducing double entendres: so meta!

So why slog?

The bad
Alas, I just found the writing really ugh. Using ‘voiceover narration'-style storytelling, whether in movies or in books, always risks becoming just one long exposition, where the narrator explains the story, rather than letting it happen. Here I felt like I was told, rather than shown, things and the voice was often over-written, even purple at times, with a snarky, overly self-aware quality. I never, ever forgot about the author, and that meant I never really suspended my disbelief.

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

It was bugging me that I didn't get it so I went back and reread the last few chapters. I admit that a lot of it went way over my head initially, including the meaning of the title. Might be a good reread one day. Adding an extra star.

Wow, this was razor-sharp. Smart and intense. Great language and insights on every page, with a few incredible set pieces (the escape from Saigon, the set of the “Apocalypse Now”-like movie) to break up the spy thriller / immigrant story.