The sympathizer

Viet Thanh Nguyen, 1971-

eBook - 2015

The winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, as well as six 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 f...riendship.

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Subjects
Genres
Spy stories
Historical fiction
War stories
Published
[United States] : Grove/Atlantic, Inc 2015.
Language
English
Corporate Author
hoopla digital
Main Author
Viet Thanh Nguyen, 1971- (author)
Corporate Author
hoopla digital (-)
Online Access
Instantly available on hoopla.
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Physical Description
1 online resource
Format
Mode of access: World Wide Web.
ISBN
9780802191694
Access
AVAILABLE FOR USE ONLY BY IOWA CITY AND RESIDENTS OF THE CONTRACTING GOVERNMENTS OF JOHNSON COUNTY, UNIVERSITY HEIGHTS, HILLS, AND LONE TREE (IA).
Contents unavailable.
Review by New York Times Review

THE MORE POWERFUL a country is, the more disposed its people will be to see it as the lead actor in the sometimes farcical, often tragic pageant of history. So it is that we, citizens of a superpower, have viewed the Vietnam War as a solely American drama in which the febrile land of tigers and elephants was mere backdrop and the Vietnamese mere extras. That outlook is reflected in the literature - and Vietnam was a very literary war, producing an immense library of fiction and nonfiction. Among all those volumes, you'll find only a handful (Robert Olen Butler's "A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain" comes to mind) with Vietnamese characters speaking in their own voices. Hollywood has been still more Americentric. In films like "Apocalypse Now" and "Platoon," the Vietnamese (often other Asians portraying Vietnamese) are never more than walk-ons whose principal roles seem to be to die or wail in the ashes of incinerated villages. Which brings me to Viet Thanh Nguyen's remarkable debut novel, "The Sympathizer." Nguyen, born in Vietnam but raised in the United States, brings a distinct 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 eternal misconceptions and misunderstandings between East and West, and the moral dilemma faced by people forced to choose not between right and wrong, but right and right. 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. Duality is literally in the protagonist's blood, for he is a half-caste, the illegitimate son of a teenage Vietnamese mother (whom he loves) and a French Catholic priest (whom he hates). Widening the split in his nature, he was educated in the United States, where he learned to speak English without an accent and developed another love-hate relationship, this one with the country that he feels has coined too many "super" terms (supermarkets, superhighways, the Super Bowl, and so on) "from the federal bank of its narcissism." The narrator's acrobatic ability to balance between two worlds is his strength and weakness, as he makes clear in his opening lines: "I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces. Perhaps not surprisingly, I am also a man of two minds, ... able to see any issue from both sides. Sometimes I flatter myself that this is a talent," he continues, but "I wonder if what I have should even be called 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." And a hazard it proves to be. The protagonist's narrative, which takes the form of a confession written to a mystery man known as "the commandant," begins in the final days of the war, as Communist forces close in on Saigon. The narrator is aide-de-camp to "the general" (one of several characters who, like the narrator, is never identified by name), the chief of South Vietnam's National Police and, with it, of Special Branch, the secret police. But the narrator is also a mole, a Communist undercover agent assigned to keep tabs on the general and Special Branch's activities. His closest friend is Bon, an assassin with the C.I.A.'s Phoenix program, "a genuine patriot" who volunteered to fight after Communists murdered his father for the crime of being a village chief. The narrator's North Vietnamese handler, Man, is also an old chum. Indeed, the narrator, Bon and Man were high school classmates, who in their youth melodramatically swore allegiance to one another by becoming blood brothers. This complex relationship, with the narrator in the tenuous middle, riven by conflicting loyalties, is a recipe for tragic betrayals, and those come, one after the other. Working through a C.I.A. spook named Claude, the narrator dispenses liberal bribes to engineer an air evacuation to the United States for the general, the general's wife and their huge extended family. Bon is also to be lifted out with his wife and child. The narrator wants to stay and take his place in a reunified Vietnam, but Man, convinced that the general and his cohort will plot a counterrevolution from abroad, gives him a new mission that is an extension of his old one: "Your general isn't the only one planning to keep on fighting," he explains. "The war's been going on too long for them to simply stop. We need someone to keep an eye on them." Nguyen presents a gripping picture of the fall of Saigon, its confusion, chaos and terror, as the narrator flees with the others under a storm of shellfire from his Viet Cong and North Vietnamese comrades. Bon's wife and child are killed before their plane takes off, giving him two more deaths to avenge. This rich narrative stew is assembled in the novel's first 50 pages, then set on a low simmer. From that brief, intense beginning we proceed to a picaresque account of the narrator's experiences as a refugee-cum-spy in Los Angeles. He lands a clerical job with his former professor, has an affair with an older Japanese-American woman and sends messages to Man (written in invisible ink) via an intermediary in Paris. Here the novel becomes both thriller and social satire. If you like your humor written in charcoal, this is the funniest part of the book, though it's occasionally spoiled by zingers that belong on "The Daily Show" more than they do in a serious novel. The narrator's espionage activities lead him to make a foray into the movie business. He is hired by a director, "the auteur" (who bears a resemblance to Francis Ford Coppola), to round up Vietnamese in a Philippine refugee camp to work as extras in his film (which bears a resemblance to "Apocalypse Now"). Nguyen adroitly handles the shifting tones of these episodes, now hilarious, now sad, as the narrator tries to do what Nguyen has done: de-Americanize the portrayal of the war. But, unlike Nguyen, he fails. Thereafter, the book's mood darkens. The narrator falls into a web of deceit and treachery spun by his dual role and the schisms in his soul. Man's suspicions prove accurate: The general and some other die-hards, guilt-ridden for not fighting to the death, bored with their mediocre lives in the States (the general has become owner of a liquor store), plot a counterrevolutionary invasion with the help of a right-wing congressman. The narrator assists in the planning, while sending reports to Man. However, to avoid having his cover blown, he is compelled to take part in two assassinations. One victim is an ex-Special Branch officer, "the crapulent major," the other is a Vietnamese journalist at a California newspaper. The descriptions of the murders are tense, psychologically complex, riveting. The narrator's conscience becomes as torn as the rest of him. "Remorse over the crapulent major's death was ringing me up a few times a day, tenacious as a debt collector," he thinks. (A parenthetical quibble. Good as it is, "The Sympathizer" is sometimes marred by overwriting. Lines like this - "The waiters arrived at that moment with the solemnity of Egyptian servants ready to be buried alive with their pharaoh, platters with the main courses propped on their shoulders" - appear a bit too often.) The general eventually assembles a ragtag army of former South Vietnamese soldiers, armed and funded by the Americans. Man, kept abreast of the scheme, orders the narrator to remain in the States even as this army heads back to Asia, but he is once again rent by divided loyalties. He feels he must go to save Bon, his blood brother, from dying in what he's sure will be a suicide mission. He finds himself caught in his familiar dilemma, "with no idea how I would manage to betray Bon and save him at the same time." The blood of friendship is thicker than the water of ideology. The narrator joins the general's army. What happens to it is predictable; what happens to the narrator and Bon is anything but. I don't want to give anything away, except to say that in its final chapters, "The Sympathizer" becomes an absurdist tour de force that might have been written by a Kafka or Genet. As that narrative unfolds, the protagonist makes several startling discoveries, among which is the identity of the commandant's own boss, the commissar. Under interrogation, the narrator goes temporarily insane; but in his madness he achieves a new mental clarity. He sees that the revolution for which he's sacrificed so much has betrayed him and everyone who fought for it - as revolutions are prone to do. EVEN THE PEOPLE who call the shots must admit that the fruits of victory are rotten, and the narrator in turn must recognize "this joke, about how a revolution fought for independence and freedom could make those things worth less than nothing." But that revelation produces an insight that saves him from complete despair: "Despite it all - yes, despite everything, in the face of nothing," he writes at the end of the "confession" that is this book, "we still consider ourselves revolutionary. We remain that most hopeful of creatures, a revolutionary in search of a revolution, although we will not dispute being called a dreamer doped by an illusion.... We cannot be alone! Thousands more must be staring into darkness like us, gripped by scandalous thoughts, extravagant hopes and forbidden plots. We lie in wait for the right moment and the just cause, which, at this moment, is simply wanting to live." The narrator's acrobatic ability to balance between two worlds is his strength and weakness. PHILIP CAPUTO is the author of "A Rumor of War" and 14 other books. He is currently working on a novel set in Mexico.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [April 5, 2015]
Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* Adept in the merciless art of interrogation, the nameless spy who narrates Nguyen's dark novel knows how to pry answers from the unwilling. Unexpectedly, however, this Vietnamese communist sympathizer finds himself being tortured by the very revolutionary zealots he has helped make victorious in Saigon. He responds to this torture by extending an intense self-interrogation already underway before his incarceration. The narrator thus plumbs his singular double-mindedness by reliving his turbulent life as the bastard son of a French priest and a devout Asian mother. Haunted by a faith he no longer accepts, insecure in the communist ideology he has embraced, the spy sweeps a vision sharpened by disillusionment across the tangled individual psyches of those close to him a friend, a lover, a comrade and into the warped motives of the imperialists and ideologues governing the world he must navigate. In an antiheroic trajectory that takes him from Vietnam during the war to the U.S. and then back, Nguyen's cross-grained protagonist exposes the hidden costs in both countries of America's tragic Asian misadventure. Nguyen's probing literary art illuminates how Americans failed in their political and military attempt to remake Vietnam but then succeeded spectacularly in shrouding their failure in Hollywood distortions. Compelling and profoundly unsettling.--Christensen, Bryce Copyright 2015 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

This astonishing first novel has at its core a lively, wry first-person narrator called the Captain, and his two school friends Bon and Man, as they navigate the fall of Saigon and the establishment of the Communist regime in Vietnam in 1975. The Captain is a half-Vietnamese double agent; he reports to his Communist minder Man who, unbeknownst to Bon, is a Republican assassin. The Captain and Bon make it on to one of the harrowing last flights out of Saigon as the city is overtaken by the Viet Cong. They travel with the Captain's superior, the General, and his family, although Bon's own wife and son are shot making their escape. The Vietnamese exiles settle uncomfortably in an America they believe has abandoned their country, as they are reduced to new roles as janitors, short-order cooks, and deliverymen. The General opens a liquor store, then a restaurant (in which his proud wife cooks the best pho outside Vietnam) as a front to raise money for a counter rebellion. In order to protect his identity as a spy, the Captain is forced to incriminate others, and as lines of loyalty and commitment blur, his values are compromised until they are worthless. Nguyen's novel enlivens debate about history and human nature, and his narrator has a poignant, often mirthful voice. Agent: Nat Sobel, Sobel Weber. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

Starred Review. Written as a postwar confessional, this novel begins with its nameless protagonist, a highly placed young aide to a general in the South Vietnamese army, recalling how he finalized the details of escape before the fall of Saigon. But our hero is a double agent, a communist sympathizer who will continue to feed information to the North even after he makes the harrowing escape with his loyalist friend Bon and the general's family on the last plane out, and becomes part of the Vietnamese refugee community in Southern California. Breathtakingly cynical, the novel has its hilarious moments; the reader will especially enjoy Nguyen's take on 1970s American life. To maintain his cover, our hero must become entangled in the general's underground resistance group, which plots a return to Vietnam through Cambodia, and the tale turns seriously dark. VERDICT Ultimately a meditation on war, political movements, America's imperialist role, the CIA, torture, loyalty, and one's personal identity, this is a powerful, thought-provoking work. It's hard to believe this effort, one of the best recent novels to cover the Vietnamese conflict from an Asian perspective, is a debut. This is right up there with Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke. [See Prepub Alert, 10/27/14.]-Reba Leiding, emeritus, James Madison Univ. Lib., Harrisonburg, VA (c) Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

A closely written novel of after-the-war Vietnam, when all that was solid melted into air.As Graham Greene and Robert Stone have taught us, on the streets of Saigon, nothing is as it seems. The racist suppositions of the empires of old helped shape a culture of subterfuge; not for nothing does the hero of Nguyen's (English and American Studies/Univ. of Southern Calif.) debut give a small disquisition on the meaning of being Eurasian or Amerasian ("a small nation could be founded from the tropical offspring of the American GI"), and not for nothing does a book meaningfully called Asian Communism and the Oriental Mode of Destruction play a part in the proceedings. Nguyen's protagonist tells us from the very first, in a call-me-Ishmael moment, that he's a mole: "I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces." Two faces, two races, neither wholly trusted. Our hero is attached to the command of a no-nonsense South Vietnamese general who's airlifted out at the fall of Saigon in 1975, protected by dewy Americans "with not a hint of a needle track in the crooks of their arms or a whiff of marijuana in their pressed, jungle-free fatigues"; whisked stateside, where the protagonist once spent time absorbing Americanness, the general is at the center of a potent community of exiles whom the protagonist is charged with spying onthough it turns out he's as much observed as observer. Think Alan Furst meets Elmore Leonard, and you'll capture Nguyen at his most surreal, our hero attempting to impress upon a Hollywood hopeful that American and Vietnamese screams sound different: "I was on my first assignment as a lieutenant," he recalls, "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." Both chilling and funny, and a worthy addition to the library of first-rate novels about the Vietnam War. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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. 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 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. But in the month when this confession begins, my way of seeing the world still seemed more of a virtue than a danger, which is how some dangers first appear. The month in question was April, the cruelest month. It was the month in which a war that had run on for a very long time would lose its limbs, as is the way of wars. It was a month that meant everything to all the people in our small part of the world and nothing to most people in the rest of the world. It was a month that was both an end of a war and the beginning of . . . well, "peace" is not the right word, is it, my dear commandant? Excerpted from The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.