Picking a random book up off of the shelf and buying it without knowing anything about it or its author is a huge risk. This risk is not necessarily a financial one. Most of us have been more cavalier in spending $20. In fact, with inflation that’s about the cost of a ham sandwich that you’re likely to only eat half of, saving the other half to be thrown out two weeks later when your start to get concerned about the mold’s military ambitions and colonization of the nearby head of broccoli in your fridge.
But when you consider that there have been over 130 million books written throughout history, and your tiny human brain will only have the stamina to power through a fraction of a percent of those books, you begin to realize how precious your reading time is.
It was the final moments of the Gibson’s Bookstore annual 25% off sale. The typically singular time each year that I purchase new books. While I’m not completely averse to spending $20 on a book, I’d much rather spend $10, $5 or even $0.5. But of course some books you simply can’t find in used bookstores…namely, new ones, so with my third trip in as many days to this long weekend sale, I was doing one last “dummy check” before heading to the register, when I noticed the red and yellow cover of The Sympathizer smartly turned outward on the shelf by the Gibson’s staff. Its orientation designed solely to grab my attention. A fox trap that worked perfectly.
On the cover read “New York Times Bestseller” (I don’t care), and “Winner of the Pulitzer Prize” (now you have my attention), but what stood out the most was the author’s name Viet Thanh Nguyen.
Viet. As in Vietnam, Viet being a common name from that country.
I’m currently working my way through reading one book from each country in the world, and have been focused heavily on Asia to start, but as of yet did not have a solid Vietnamese author selected. I became excited thinking that this may be the one.
After a quick google search, I saw what I so often see when buying books from the shelves of an American bookstore, an author born in another country but was raised in America. (Because, oh that’s right, the Pulitzer is only given to Americans )That’s when the internal debate begins…How Vietnamese is this person really? Will I get the perspective of life in this country or will it be too Americanized?
It’s a conversation I try to avoid, as it reeks of some backwards blood quantum qualification system that not only do I not want to participate in, but defeats the whole purpose of reading books from other countries, which is to see the world from different perspectives and to gain an understanding of those who’s lives have been much different than mine.
But being in a rush and not having the gumption to say “no” to myself in the face of a potentially good book at a discounted price, I added it to my stack, completely unaware that my inappropriate and potentially very offensive unspoken question of “Is this person Vietnamese enough to check off an arbitrary box I created” was a central tenet of The Sympathizer.
A Tale of Two Cities Minds
The Sympathizer is narrated by an unnamed protagonist, who is a communist spy, working among the ranks of the Southern Vietnamese. Entrenched so deeply in his covert role, he flees to America with the other Southern Vietnamese Refugees after the fall of Saigon.
Although the book starts very quickly with momentous action during this crucial point in The Vietnam War, this is not exactly a book about war, daring covert missions, or mind blowing spy tactics. Instead it’s a book about being cleaved into parts by all of the groups that influence a man.
“Death would hurt only for a moment, which was not so bad when one considered how much, and for how long, life hurt.”
Born to a Vietnamese mother and a French father, having studied in America for college, and then serving in the South Vietnamese army as a North Vietnamese spy, our protagonist also asks himself the question “Am I Vietnamese enough?” which helped to somewhat lessen the guilt of my earlier thought crime.
One thing you will notice about reading books from other countries, is a lot of them are the same. You would think that life in various countries would be different, but shamefully many foreign works translated into English have a plot summary that could read like this: Everything was great. Americans came and killed a bunch of us for our own good. Then everything wasn’t great. This is no fault of the writer’s of these books, the shame is fully on Team America in these instances.
While America deserves a lot of (if not all of) the blame in many of these “conflicts”, The Sympathizer takes an alternate approach. While there are four subdivisions to our protagonist, each one gets thorough introspection and partitioning of the blame.
It’s true that America probably should have never been involved in Vietnam, however there was rape, murder and other atrocities carried about by Vietnamese against their fellow citizens. Here in America we honor our war heroes, but never acknowledge the Vietnamese that fought along side of us in those battles, for example the fact that there are no Vietnamese names listed on the Vietnam memorial in Washington, DC.
What we get from The Sympathizer is a story of two countries, and a story of one man who is a “man of two minds.” It reads unlike a war memoir, unlike a targeted history, and unlike most anything else I’ve read.
At times I was surprised by the books humor which reminded me of Heller’s Catch-22 with its repetitive use of descriptive nicknames of military men (The Crapulent Major, the Dark Marine, the Affectless Lieutenant) while the book’s final act gave me the same sense of helplessness as Orwell’s 1984.
But despite these similarities, Nguyen’s voice is his own in this incredibly unique work of what I would consider, historical fiction, and for me served as a great entry point into more Vietnamese literature and history. It has humor, violence, romance, heartache, friendship, guilt and betrayal. In reflection, The Sympathizer is one of the most complete and emotionally diverse novels I’ve read in a long, long time.
Overall score 4.5 out of 5.