Viet Thanh Nguyen’s astonishing novel takes us inside the mind of this double agent, a man whose lofty ideals necessitate his betrayal of the people closest to him. The Sympathizer is the story of this captain: a man brought up by an absent French father and a poor Vietnamese mother, a man who went to university in America, but returned to Vietnam to fight for the Communist cause. The general and his compatriots start a new life in Los Angeles, unaware that one among their number, the captain, is secretly observing and reporting on the group to a higher-up in the Viet Cong. At his villa, a general of the South Vietnamese army is drinking whiskey and, with the help of his trusted captain, drawing up a list of those who will be given passage aboard the last flights out of the country.
It is April 1975, and Saigon is in chaos. In dialogue with but diametrically opposed to the narratives of the Vietnam War that have preceded it, this novel offers an important and unfamiliar new perspective on the war: that of a conflicted communist sympathizer.
Beth Novey adapted it for the Web.A profound, startling, and beautifully crafted debut novel, The Sympathizer is the story of a man of two minds, someone whose political beliefs clash with his individual loyalties. Peter Breslow and Melissa Gray produced and edited this interview for broadcast. And so, you know, people can read it and be provoked, or be entertained, but they don't need footnotes in order to to get what I'm saying. But in the novel, I can get away with it - I hope. And if I were to say many of the same things I say in The Committed, I'd have to, like, have extensive footnotes to prove my point. The things he says are kind of obnoxious or kind of very critical, they might disrupt, you know, a nice casual cocktail party conversation and almost unacademic. He allows me to say things that I would find it difficult to say in person to other people. And in these novels, I just amplify that to a much greater and more dramatic and more interesting way through "the sympathizer." like a Vietnamese spying on Americans, like an American spying on Vietnamese. And, you know, I think he is, in many ways, an alter ego. I've been with him a long time, and it's hard to leave him. On whether his narrator is still with him
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