The Sympathizer

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.

There are some great novels set against the backdrop of the Vietnam War and Viet Thanh Nguyen's "The Sympathizer" provides a fresh and original narrative to that list. The story is set during Saigon's final days as the Viet Cong makes its final advance on the city and South Vietnamese are desperate to flee the city before likely retribution from the VC. A South Vietnamese General is organizing a final evacuation that will provide safe transport to some of the last refugees from the South and a nameless captain is helping him decide who will be the fortunate individuals to get the final seats on the plane. This nameless captain is of mixed ethnicity, born to a French father (absent from his upbringing) and a Vietnamese mother. The captain left Vietnam for college in southern California and returned to war divided Vietnam as a communist spy and "sympathizer" amidst the South Vietnamese Army. Nguyen's novel works on many levels whose underlying theme is the struggle for identity --- national and individual identity obscured through various shades blending together. The nameless of the captain is the most obvious of blended identities --- mixed races of European and Asian, mixed cultural identities, French and Vietnamese as well as country identities, Vietnamese and American along with serving in the South Vietnamese Army while being a communist spy. However, our captain confronts a world of characters and ideas that often live and act from a place of absolutes where identity is black and white. Even the captain's most intimate and personal relationships, childhood "blood" brothers Bon and Man, is multi-layered with deep secrets, betrayals and surprising twists. There are several brilliant dark comedic moments in this novel, none better than the captain convincing a director/studio to hire him to consult on an American film about the Vietnam War, "Hamlet", being shot in Thailand. Clearly borrowing from "Apocalypse Now" as an inspiration, it is brilliantly observed and written by Nguyen with both funny and poignant moments. While I admire Nguyen's story and the challenging questions presented to his readers, my main quibble was with the last quarter of the book and it was not for how things unfolded. Rather it was with the writing style which felt a lot more complex and confusing than throughout the rest of the book. It just took a lot more energy and focus compared to the ease of the writing in the rest of the book. Despite that, "The Sympathizer" belongs on any reading list given its originality 40 years after the fall of Saigon.

The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen is simply superb. Written with an unflinching eye and great humor, it is a brilliant and chilling look into the hearts and minds of men and the cruelty we inflict upon each other. The first 50 or so pages are devoted to the introduction of the Captain; a mole in South Vietnam's special forces. He is also a bastard, and half-breed, with a Vietnamese mother he adores and a French father (who also happens to be a Roman Catholic priest) he despises. He is a microcosm of a homeland divided in half--with a dual nature and opposites that seem to only attract loathing or disdain. This is the fall of Saigon, the Vietnam war and the dislocation to America told from an Asian perspective, and a story non-Asian Americans should read if only for that viewpoint. But there is so much more: brilliant writing and beautiful prose that is often hilarious, and always thought-provoking. "I calmed the tremor in my gut. I was in close quarters with some representative of the most dangerous creature in the history of the world, the white man in a suit." Or, "you must claim America, she said. America will not give itself to you. If you do not claim America, if America is not in your heart, America will throw you into a concentration camp, or a reservation or a plantation." This is not an easy book to read--and no, not because there aren't quotation marks. God help some of these reviewers if they ever pick up Virginia Woolf or James Joyce. At times though the scenes of torture and rape are sickening and the author's pov about American hegemony (cultural and political) is going to disturb many. But it is challenging in the very best way. The Sympathizer does what great literature is supposed to do--force us out of our comfort zone to rethink assumptions. This wonderful, disturbing, challenging novel will do more than that--it will affirm something indomitable and essential about us all--a desire to carry on, and to live.

I always thought one could not go wrong with a Pulitzer novel, but this one disappoints on many levels while being rewarding on others. It's a story that needed to be told from a Vietnamese perspective and as such enlightens the reader. The sense of the tragedy of war in Southeast Asia is brought home with unmitigated intensity and often artfully stated. On the other hand, the style of presentation is often trite and tiresome. It's patently obvious that a thesaurus was only a mouse click away and said mouse got quite a workout. Archaisms distract from the narrative rather than enlighten. Speaking of distracting, the author repeatedly goes off on Molly Bloom-esque riffs that contributed nought to the narrative and had me skipping sheafs of pages without missing anything. That makes this another of those 200 page books crammed into 600 pages. And then there's the abandonment of traditional punctuation to emphasize the pseudo-stream-of-consciousness. Sorry, Viet, it's been done a zillion times already. It seems Pulitzer is rewarding cleverness over artistry. In conclusion, this is a powerful, necessary and engaging story damaged by its presentation. Disclaimer: I'm a Vietnam veteran with a masters in literature. BFD, eh?

The Sympathizer, by Viet Nguyen, is a new breed of noir novel, which academia is turning out these days. The author is a distinguished man of letters at in California, so I would expect nothing less from him. And he doesn’t disappoint. This is the story of the Vietnam conflict told through the eyes of an undercover spy, a mole, a deep operative, a man without a name who is a metaphor for so much. Except that he can’t seem to remember who he is. The narrator of The Sympathizer works as a spy for the Viet Cong and, eventually, the Vietnamese government. He’s pointed out as a bright boy early on by a CIA operative named Claude. He is recruited by the United States to come study at a prestigious university. The narrator returns just as the Vietnam conflict is entering its final stages. The product of a relationship between a French priest and a village woman, he never quite fits into any society, and this allows him to see the world from many perspectives. He’s introduced as an aide to a South Vietnamese general in charge of counter-intelligence. From this position, he’s able to pass information on to the Vietnamese communists about what the nationalists are up to at any given moment. He also witnesses some of the most frightening atrocities committed against the Viet Cong supporters. He has two good friends, one a rabid anti-communist (his father was made to kneel and take a bullet to the head by the communists) and the other his contact in the Viet Cong. When the general flees to escape the advancing communist troops, the narrator is ordered to go with him. He returns to the US and takes a position at a liberal arts college. There he watches the general attempt to restart the war by way of his connections and secret bases near Vietnam. It’s all a complete waste of time as no one wants to keep on fighting. A Vietnamese journalist in the US argues to forget about the war and gets a bullet in the head from the general’s people. Meanwhile, the narrator records everything and sends in via invisible ink to a contact in France. The plight of the South Vietnamese nationalists is painful to read. They flee to the United States and are forced to start over from scratch. For all his attempts at viewing them through communist eyes, you see the proud officers and trained elite of a society turn into waiters, liquor storeowners and day jobbers. Worst of all, the narrator is hired to fix a script for a Hollywood movie about the conflict which has all the worst tropes of any Vietnam War film. As the narrator points out to the “auteur” who directs it, there aren’t even any speaking parts for Vietnamese. Even the parts for the Vietnamese are played by Chinese and other Asian actors. The crowd scenes are accomplished by hiring out starving boat people living in a refugee camp for one dollar a day. Eventually, the narrator ends back up in Vietnam. He disobeys his contact’s instructions and follows his childhood friend on a suicide mission to the Vietnam border. On a secret mission into his former country, he is captured. Of course, he’s given the sendoff by the general whom he’s worked off all these years because of his interest in the general’s daughter: “You should have known better, Captain. You are a soldier. Everything and everyone belongs in his proper place. How could you ever believe we would allow our daughter to be with someone of your kind? My kind? I said. What do you mean by my kind? Oh, Captain, said the General. You are a fine young man, but you are also, in case you have not noticed, a bastard. They waited for me to say something, but the General had stuffed the one word in my mouth that could silence me. Seeing that I had nothing to say, they shook their heads in anger, sorrow, and recrimination, leaving me at the gate with my bottle of whiskey…. It was stuck in my throat and had the taste of a woolen sock sodden with our homeland’s rich mud, the kind of meal I had forgotten was reserved for those who ranked among the meanest.” And this is where the book really takes off. Because the communist reeducation camp makes Orwell’s Coventry resemble a holiday in Colorado. We find out that the entire book, written as a confession stems from this part. The narrator, although a deep cover agent from the communist Viet Cong, is accused by them of being a turncoat. He attempts to prove otherwise by writing the confession. The final phase of this part of the book is strictly from Room 303. Although there are no caged rats, the mental and physical torture the narrator’s former handlers put him through is terrifying. I have found few descriptions of physical torture, which disturbed me so much. The book is written in first person with no quotation marks. Sometimes it gets a little hard to identify the speaker, but you become accustomed to the style after a while. Here is a good example of it: “I looked at Ms. Mori, sipping her wine. He died in the war? No, she said. He refused to go to war. So he got sent to prison instead. He’s still bitter about it. Not that he shouldn’t be. God knows I’d probably be bitter if I were him. I’d just like for him to be happier than he is. The war’s thirty years past and it still lives with him, even though he didn’t go and fight. He fought, Sonny said. He just fought at home. Who can blame him? The government puts his family in a camp and then asks him to go fight for the country? I’d be mad as hell, too. A mist of smoke now separated the three of us. The faint eddies of our thoughts took fleeting, evanescent material shape, and for a brief moment a ghostly version of myself hovered over Sonny’s head. Where’s Abe now? I said.” This is a great spy novel and should be read by every fan of the genre. No handsome men in tuxedos who play with high-tech weapons. Just gritty people who try to survive in a world that shifts on them. More George Smiley than Bond. Still, an important book that I recommend. http://www.spysafehouse.com/?p=4691

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.

The emotional charge of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s extraordinary debut novel The Sympathizer will keep your heart pounding and your blood chilled. Tim O’Brien’s story collection The Things They Carried still stands as the landmark for examining the American soldier’s perspective on the Vietnam War, but Nguyen now owns the patent for his haunting insights and revelations of the Vietnamese experience from both sides of the conflict. In this case, the unnamed narrator is, indeed, the sympathizer, a Viet Cong spy with the self-proclaimed “talent” to understand all aspects of his country’s complexity and demise. Starting with his escape on one of the last flights out of Saigon to his exile in the United States, the story leads from one spellbinding adventure to another. Using an array of lenses, the narrator puts the politics, machinations, and history of the unmerciful war under intense scrutiny, and he gives the Vietnamese people their much-needed voice of identity and a deserved sense of nationality as he examines their unwavering strength and sacrifice. The narrator’s blistering honesty and keen intelligence combines sorrow and compassion with dark humor to deliver a sometimes shocking and an altogether breathtaking tale of tragedy and survival. Making the book all the more remarkable is Nguyen’s electric prose. His language has a lush and scintillating quality that makes for an unforgettable reading experience. Having won the Pulitzer, the book now has its immortality, but it’s not an exaggeration to call it a masterpiece.

Brief summary and review, no spoilers. This story is told from the point of view of an unnamed young narrator who was born in Vietnam. He the son of a white Catholic priest and a Vietnamese woman. Because of this, he was often looked upon with prejudice by those Vietnamese around him and he always felt the conflict from being from both cultures. That conflict helps drive the theme of this book. The story takes place in Vietnam before, during, and just after the conflict there in the 1960's and early 70's. We are witnesses to the frantic last flights out made by many South Vietnamese as they fled the Viet Cong takeover. We also see it again years later. Our narrator accompanies the South Vietnamese leader to the United States. We know from the start that he is actually a spy for the Viet Cong, and throughout the book we come to understand the conflict he has with that both on a physical and emotional level. He sympathizes with both sides; he can understand and empathize from all points of view. He has two best friends - who he considers his blood-brothers - Man and Bon. Man remains in Vietnam as part of the Viet Cong whereas Bon travels with our narrator and remains loyal to the U.S. and the South Vietnamese regime, which is hoping to return a make a comeback. Our narrator reports back to the Viet Cong on these plans. Our narrator does return to Vietnam, and it is here where he truly has to face his own actions and betrayals that we, as readers, come to understand and feel. He is truly a man that is torn between two worlds yet one who wants to be honorable and do the right thing. This is just a magnificent book. I do have to say that it took me a little while to get into the story, but then I was completely hooked and couldn't put it down. There have been so many wonderful books written about Vietnam and I have to say that this is one of the best I have ever read. I have never felt such empathy for the people of Vietnam, having read mainly books written about the American experience there. The way it is told is just so interesting - we seem to be getting so many points of view yet it's from our narrator - it's like we get a 360 degree view of it all. And in case I didn't mention, there are not only some fantastic and profound quotes in this novel, there are some laugh out loud funny comments at time too which is great. We read this for my book club and had one of our best discussions. Recommended.