Nguyen was four years old when he and his family arrived as refugees in the U.S. A Google search brought up an interview on NPR’s All Things Considered, April 11, 2015. We learn early on what led the narrator, a captain, to sympathize with the communists.Īfter voraciously reading the first 100 pages, I needed to learn more about this talented and funny writer. Rather than bother with it himself he left it to his junior officer to read the books by Mao, Marx, and Lenin in order to understand what fueled the enemy’s mindset. The general loves all things American and French. The narrator, a junior officer to a South Vietnamese general, is half Vietnamese and half French. The story begins just before the fall of Saigon in 1975. I am simply able to see any issue from both sides.” I am not some misunderstood mutant from a comic book or a horror movie, although some have treated me as such. Perhaps not surprisingly, I am also a man of two minds. “I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces.

Besides, I was the one who took the effort to go to the library and critically comb through the “New Additions” shelves for the ‘just right’ book to follow my last completed novel, one that would fit my mood and complement the audio book on the iPod in my car.

I should read The Sympathizer first just to spite, uh I mean, see if my husband the hawk would even like it. It’s natural to have conflicted feelings about the role the US played in the war and our clumsy exit from Southeast Asia.īut back to the ‘first dibs’ claim. I imagine you’re scowling now, thinking it’s treasonous and possibly un-American to consider the point of view that led to the deaths of our young soldiers.īut many of us grew up in the gray-blue light of TV news footage of wounded and dead soldiers in Vietnam, Walter Cronkite and the unceasing tally of casualties and deaths, images of protesters burning draft cards, and, to quote Cosby, Stills, Nash, & Young: “4 dead in Ohio” at the hands of the National Guard during a student protest at Kent State. Still, why should I give in? After all, this is exactly the kind of fiction that attracts me: “darkly comic” and “satirical” while also addressing the decidedly un-funny Vietnam War from the perspective of a communist spy. His curiosity was piqued by the cover comment “A remarkable debut…both thriller and social satire.” My husband reminded me he’d finished his last book and loves a good spy novel. When I brought Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer home from the library, my husband tried to claim ‘first dibs.’

Books like the sympathizer