Should I not refer to those people, my enemies, as “them”? I confess that after spending my whole life in their company I cannot help but sympathize with them, as I do with many others. My weakness for sympathizing with others has much to do with my status as a bastard, which is not to say that being a bastard naturally predisposes one to sympathy.The first line of The Sympathizer is a confession – I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces – and it soon becomes clear that the entire book is a handwritten confession; a document penned by a Vietnamese double-agent under the editorial direction of a shadowy Commandant, aiming to satisfy the demands of an even shadowier Commissar. Beginning with a fraught escape during the fall of Saigon, the unnamed narrator alternates between sketching in his past and moving forward to describe the brief spell he spent as a postwar refugee in Southern California, along the way preserving a point-of-view about the Vietnam War that has been bizarrely underrepresented until now; that of the Vietnamese people themselves. In a way, I can totally see how author Viet Thanh Nguyen won the Pulitzer Prize with this book – it's interesting, well written, and considering the subject matter, certainly important – but like with most of the Pulitzer winners I've read, this book succeeds intellectually while falling short emotionally; I felt little connection and am left, like the narrator, of two minds.
Our country itself was cursed, bastardized, partitioned into north and south, and if it could be said of us that we chose division and death in our uncivil war, that was also only partially true. We had not chosen to be debased by the French, to be divided by them into an unholy trinity of north, center, and south, and to be turned over to the great powers of capitalism and communism for a further bisection, then given roles as the clashing armies of a Cold War chess match played in air-conditioned rooms by white men wearing suits and lies.Two things are repeated over and over about the narrator: he is cursed/blessed with the ability to sympathise with others and he is a bastard; both of these facts point to him being as divided internally as his beloved country is around him. Born the son of a French priest (who, although he was the narrator's pastor and schoolteacher, never claimed the boy) and his thirteen-year-old maid (ew), the narrator was never accepted as fully Vietnamese by his compatriots. When he moved to the United States (first as a university scholarship student and later as a refugee), his white half gained him no privilege: he was too white for Vietnam, too Asian for the States. The only two boys to stand up for him in high school became his best friends and blood brothers, and although he repeatedly proves that he would die for either of them, they also divide his loyalties: Man is a Viet Cong Communist agent who indoctrinates and then admits the narrator to his sleeper cell and Bon is a CIA-trained assassin who targets the Viet Cong. The narrator himself, while secretly a Communist mole, serves as the aide-de-camp for a General in the South Vietnamese Army: as the narrator, Bon, and the General are sprinting for the last plane out of Saigon, the narrator is both desperate to see Bon to safety and inwardly cheering at the Communist success.
(T)his 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).While taking his place among the other “Boat People” in California, the narrator is repeatedly in conflict with Americans – from the Chair of the Oriental Studies department at the university where the narrator works, to a right-wing Congressman who isn't against diverting funds from the black budget to a resistance force – who think they have more informed and nuanced views of the Vietnam War than the actual Vietnamese people. This subplot reaches its apogee when the narrator is hired on as a consultant for a Hollywood director (obviously Francis Ford Coppola) who is making the ultimate Vietnam movie (obviously Apocalypse Now), and while the film that results is better for the narrator's efforts, it is still an Americentric effort that uses the Vietnamese setting and people as the backdrop for a wholly American story. There is quite a bit funny in this section, and especially the depiction of the Thespian (obviously Marlon Brando); a method actor so embedded in his character that he refuses to bathe during the months-long jungle shoot (despite the narrator – a former actual tropical soldier – explaining that fighting men everywhere take every opportunity to clean themselves), until he's filming the ultimate death scene, stinking like fermenting cheese, and bemoaning the prostitute who betrayed him in the end, intoning, “The whore...the whore...”. (That one image totally takes the piss out of the whole cult of Apocalypse Now.) But while this section seems to play for laughs, there is a further duality for the narrator when later in his confession the most horrific scenes from the movie – rape and torture and murder – make their appearances.
There was much lovely writing in The Sympathizer: I appreciated little lines like, “No one asks poor people if they want war”, and thought the following was a lovely metaphor as the three blood brothers spend a final evening together in Saigon on the night before the evac, singing Yesterday along with a crowd in a bar:
So it was that for two minutes we sang with all our hearts, feeling only for the past and turning our gaze from the future, the swimmers doing the backstroke toward a waterfall.On the other hand, however, the story often felt overwritten; the metaphors heavy-handed and relentless:
I was dressed in a flimsy crepe gown, but despite the lightness of this and the sheet, a soporific heaviness pressed down on me, scratchy as an army blanket, oppressive as unwanted love. A man in a white coat stood at the foot of my bed, reading a chart on a clipboard with the intensity of a dyslexic. He had the wild, neglected hair of a graduate student in astrophysics; his protuberant belly spilled over the dam of his belt; and he was mumbling into a tape recorder.Much is redeemed by the final section – when we learn who the Commandant and the Commissar are and why the narrator is writing his confession – and the concluding duality (while nothing is more precious than independence and freedom, nothing is also more precious than independence and freedom!) is a satisfying rebuke of Communism, colonialism, and all imperialistic efforts; the thoroughly appropriate conclusion for a Vietnamese-American writer to arrive at. Because it soundly achieves the goal of presenting and preserving the Vietnamese perspective on the Vietnam War, The Sympathizer can be deemed a success. But because it sometimes bored me and made me roll my eyes at individual lines, because I never felt engaged or connected to the characters, because as a Canadian I'm outside of the personal history that I assume American readers would feel, this book wasn't my favourite. This is one of those books that as a recommendation I would say, “You should read this, even if you might not completely enjoy it”. I'd give it 3.5 stars and am rounding it up.
Your destiny is being a bastard, while your talent, as you say, is seeing from two sides. You would be better off if you only saw things from one side. The only cure for being a bastard is to take a side.
