Much has already been written about "The Sympathizer," a Pulitzer-prize winning novel by Viet Thanh Nguyen that takes a different slant on the Vietnam war.
It wasn't on my reading list, but it was given to me and I was going on a trip that promised long waits in airport lounges and long hours on airplanes so I thought, why not?
The exceptionally well-researched book reads a bit like the script of a Hollywood film-noir movie, in part because the protagonist, a double agent working undercover first in Saigon and then in Los Angeles for the ultimately victorious communist North Vietnamese, behaves like a film-noir tough guy, and pretty much talks like one too.
But the protagonist also sees both sides of most situations -- because, we are told, he is the bastard child of a French priest and a Vietnamese woman and thus never quite fits in anywhere. Much is made of that and a lot of insights apparently stem from it, most of them interesting enough to keep one reading.
I particularly liked a couple of sentences:
"Americans on average do not trust intellectuals, but they are cowed by power and stunned by celebrity."
And ...
"Slogans are empty suits draped around the corpses of ideas."
Very good -- both of them.
Overall, while "The Sympathizer" is far more than a beach (or airplane) read, it falls short of great literature. The ending, in particular, is disappointing from an intellectual point of view.
So where exactly does it fit in?
The author probably put it best in answer to an interviewer who asked: "What void do you think "The Sympathizer" fills?
"When I was imagining the novel into being, I felt that there still wasn't a novel that directly confronts the history of the American war in Vietnam from the Vietnamese American point of view," Viet Thanh Nguyen replied. In addition, he said, he didn't think existing literature was sufficiently angry when it came to American culture and to the United States.
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