LOVED IT BECAUSE: You get to view the Vietnam War from a totally different perspective--in this case, that of a South Vietnamese officer who is actually an American educated spy for the communist North. And that's just one view--other themes addressed against the backdrop of the war include: poverty, Hollywood "yellow-washing", torture (it's hard work!), love-making and billiards, confession, forgetting and happiness as a zero-sum game in war.
Nguyen is at his most thrilling amidst his astute observations of the culture clashes and melanges between Vietnamese refugees (he draws a sharp distinction that they are NOT immigrants) and American culture. This struggle to not even assimilate--but merely survive--is deftly describe in a page long diatribe in which the author rattles off a laundry lists of rumor mill failures swirling through their community to include "the politician's wife demoted to cleaning bedpans in a nursing home who one day snapped, attacked her husband with a kitchen knife, then was committed to a mental war," or "the devout Buddhist who spanked his son and was arrested for child abuse in Houston." But we also she the way the community's triumphs are cherished: "the girl elected President of her high school class in Baton Rouge", or "the boy accepted into Harvard from Fond du Lac."
The Sympathizer is, however, a book about war and loss and forgetting and remembering. Nguyen wryly notes that, thanks to the Hollywood industrial global superstructure, Vietnam was the first war where the losers got to write the history. As he notes in his interview (linked below), the average American's impression and views on war are largely influenced by cinema--in this novel we see the particular influence of Apocalypse Now--a movie that the author recalls with marked unease as he transitioned from initially cheering the US soldiers to disheartened silence as his own countrymen were mowed down. Ultimately, he makes a strong case that Hollywood doesn't make art--it makes propaganda. Its films are "America's way of softening up the rest of the world, Hollywood relentlessly assaulting the mental defense of the audience with the hit, the smash, the spectacle, the blockbuster, and yes, even the box office bomb."
One of my favorite lines from the book is Nguyen's observation that "men will die for someone who remembers their name"--it is this love, this relationship that drives men in war and in this story's case that drives group of refugee soldiers to return to Vietnam in an attempt to take back their country from the communist victors. This little known historical foray is the focus of the last third of the book takes the reader full loop as we discover why the entire book is written as a confession. It is in the meat of this last section that the protagonist grapples with the larger philosophical questions surrounding his role as a spy--particularly the idea of sins of omission--those in which the soldier watched and did nothing. While the main character doesn't realize it, while his inaction is significant, it's minuscule judged against the backdrop of a life filled with deliberate actions. As the nameless narrator contemplates death and his desire for even "seven more seconds of obscene bliss" he ultimately come to the conclusion that all humans are driven by a desire for some type of revolution, even a cause as simple as the desire to live. It's with that sentiment that the author's closes the novel: "We will live!" The story's potency comes from the fact that the idea of who "we" actually is (i.e., the protagonist's divided identity, the Vietnamese people at large, all people etc.) has become a larger question that must be considered when thinking about this war.
These paragraphs are just one way that novel could be addressed, in my notes below you will see about a dozen other themes that the novel addresses. Were I teaching a college course on the literature of the Vietnamese war, I would pair this novel with the masterful Matterhorn
(my review of it is here) which also delves in the nature of war on a microcosmic level from the view of one educated American soldier. Then, I would bookend both novels with O'Brien's The Things They Carried
--in particular "Sweetheart of Song Tra Bong." LOOK OUT: Whenever I read a great book, I instantly yearn for a movie version. In this case, however, I am not sure that Vietnam is a war that Hollywood's interested in portraying anymore . But I could see an adaption of this novel that's set in Iraq instead.
For further reading: Check out the transcript from a great interview of the author on NPR's Fresh Air right here.
My 2016, 2015 and 2014 Reading Lists.
NOTES from 2016 paperback version (ISBN: 978-1-4721-5136-0):
p.3 the poor and war
p. 12 "consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds" emerson
p. 15 south vietnamese are the italians of asia
p. 31 vietnamese and lines
p. 37"ready to treat any unmentionables with the pencilin of American goodness"
p. 66 how vietnamese pronounce us cities
p. 67 the lifeblood of vietnam--fish sauce
p. 68-69 culture clashes
p. 74 asian communism and sex
p. 112 the twist as the favorite S. Vietnamese dance song
p. 116 the best kind of truth
p. 120 white as the color of death
p. 129 In vietnam losers write the history
p. 128-9 Hollywood yellow washing
p. 146 boat people
p. 161 torture is hard work
p. 166 Hollywood propaganda and art
p. 180 Vietnamese HATE country music
p. 182-3 American tension between guilt and innocence
p. 194 Asian family trees
p. 202 Vodka and russian novels
p. 214 Men will die for someone who remembers their names
p. 226 sadness, camus and cognac
p. 229 Vietnamese life soundtrack
p. 232 the West invented cleavage
p. 246 Happiness is a zero sum game
p. 230 On never forgetting Saigon
p. 256 billiards and lovemaking
p. 251 Life and losing the war
p. 269 American things he will miss
p. 280 similarities between remaining S. Vietnamese fighters the VC
p. 294 Fearing death and loving life
p. 323 We can never stop confessing
p. 348 He watched and did nothing
p. 359 In communism money trumps all
"We" will live
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