Wednesday, August 7, 2019

The Sympathizer

The Sympathizer* by Viet Thanh Nguyen won the 2016 Pulitzer for Fiction. I respect the book and appreciate that Nguyen gave a voice to a Vietnamese American point of view while shitting on America's shittiness in Vietnam. The narrator is half-French, half-Vietnamese. He grows up in Vietnam but spends a large portion of his adult life studying in America. He is secretly a communist agent in disguise as a Vietnamese army captain working with America to democratize Vietnam. 


This info is on the back of the book; if it wasn’t, I’d be lost from the get-go. The narrators’ contradictory identities are disorienting for the reader-- and I’m sure that’s the point since the narrator is disoriented himself. Regardless of intention, the result-- for me, at least-- was that I read almost 400 pages of someone’s voice and still had no idea where his allegiances truly lay. He seemed to have convictions, but I couldn’t identify them. I wasn’t invested in the narrator enough, because I didn’t really know him at all. So, when things happened to him, I found it hard to care. I didn’t have an emotional connection to him. I usually dig an unreliable narrator (hello, Slaughterhouse-Five, I love you), but this dude bored me, which surprised me since it’s touted as a spy novel of sorts.


There were several moments when I simultaneously didn’t enjoy an aspect of the book and thought to myself, well, that’s probably the point. I think the last 80 pages are total gibberish. I didn’t enjoy reading that portion at all, but I think that’s the objective because the narrator is also not enjoying himself. Maybe I’m overemphasizing “enjoyment” and underemphasizing Nguyen’s achievements covering controversial topics (Vietnam war, responsibilities towards refugees, communism vs. democracy, etc). My takeaway: The Sympathizer is more suitable for a classroom setting. Intellectually, it has much to offer, but no, I did not enjoy reading the book. The Sympathizer receives 2 out of 5 camel humps.

*Nguyen, Viet Thanh. The Sympathizer. New York: Grove Press, 2015. Print.

No comments:

Post a Comment