The book:
The Vietnam war is one of the most culturally explored of all wars, with tumultuous media coverage at the time followed up by books, academic literature and countless films dedicated to it. What has been missing, however, is a literary answer born of the country itself.
Viet Thanh Nguyen’s debut novel not only answers this long-overdue call for a Vietnamese perspective, but does so with such skill and artfulness that it was a dead cert for our Shelf Improvement book this month. Framed alongside but inherently opposed to the Western narrative, our protagonist is a South Vietnamese communist sympathizer. Starting at the fall of Saigon, and fighting against the communists, the Captain soon ends up in America, where his army allies have taken up a new life – and his life as a double-agent evolves.
The Sympathizer is an epic story spanning espionage, politics, love and inner turmoil. Set in between the two worlds involved in the conflict, it guides the reader to consider the very frame through which they – we – see the Vietnam war, and indeed war in film, literature and media to this day. We hope you enjoy our Shelf Improvement choice this month.
What the Guardian thought:
‘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.” Viet Thanh Nguyen’s new novel begins with a showy riff on Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Thereafter, Ellison’s novel offers a template for Nguyen’s; its unnamed narrator-protagonist, like Ellison’s, recounts and attempts to make sense of his variously doubled life from a position of concealment – in this case, as a prisoner forced to make a political confession.
The title character of Nguyen’s comparatively hot and sprawling story is defined by the divisions he has straddled from birth: the illegitimate son of a French Catholic priest and a teenage Vietnamese villager, he grows up at odds with the world around him. He emerges with a sense of this double identity as a source of both pain and power, and goes to the United States in the 1960s for a college education and introduction to all that’s barbarous and bright in American life. He returns to Vietnam to help keep all that at bay and finds himself naturally suited to espionage, which he pursues while working in the South Vietnamese army and serving as the trusted aide of a general with strong CIA connections.
The 1975 fall of Saigon to communist forces and the desperate escape of South Vietnamese citizens – elites, American co-operators, ordinary people – forms the novel’s first major sequence. As civilians and the remaining ranks of the defeated army alike fight each other for spots on departing planes, the narrator, known only as the Captain, describes “the call of the Katyusha rockets, hissing in the distance like librarians demanding silence”. Thereafter, Nguyen shifts the novel into a more moderate pace as the refugees resettle in California. Here we have an account of 1970s and 80s immigrant life and its standard anomie and nostalgia and generational conflicts, amid liquor store and ethnic restaurant ambiences. The Captain finds work at a local university under the supervision of a magnificently unreconstructed orientalist academic while remaining in close contact with the General and his plans for mounting a counterrevolution.
The Captain is immersed in all of these intersecting events and simultaneously stands outside of them as confidant to his General and epistolary informant to his unseen communist handler. In turn, he reflects about it all as a courageously ambivalent figure in increasingly absurdist and horrifying circumstances.
The Sympathizer is an excellent literary novel, and one that ends, with unsettling present-day resonance, in a refugee boat where opposing ideas about intentions, actions and their consequences take stark and resilient human form.
Randy Boyagoda - Read the full review
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