The Sympathizer

I started reading The Sympathizer a few days before I boarded my flight for Ho Chi Minh City, after hearing a podcast featuring the author Viet Thanh Nguyen. Born in Vietnam, he fled to America with his family after the fall of Saigon. Starting his life in the US in a refugee camp, he’s now a professor at the University of Southern California and Pulitzer Prize winning novelist. I was intrigued and promptly obtained a copy. Every day of wandering in Vietnam ended with me gripping the 500 page book in the wooden bathtub, the fluffy bed, or curled up on the balcony with a cup of ginger tea reading voraciously.

The Sympathizer is a highly entertaining espionage novel; witty, and full of dark humor. Written as a confession, it begins with the fall of Saigon and follows the journey of a Vietnamese army captain (secretly a communist sleeper agent) who ends up in America with the mission of sending intelligence back to his Viet Cong comrades. The captain is the narrator and he is highly intellectual, personally conflicted, sharp as a razor, relentless in his wit, imagination, and ability to infuse his storytelling with pop culture references, identity politics, and nostalgia.

The book takes an unexpected yet interesting detour when the captain becomes a consultant on the set of a Hollywood film being produced about the Vietnam war. This raises questions about the ways in which history is captured, distorted, and reproduced for mass audiences in order to promote a certain narrative with certain heroes and certain villains that serve a certain political agenda.

Loyalty, friendship, ideology, and identity are some of the themes that emerge from the pages of this fast-paced thriller and nothing is simply black or white. Capitalism versus communism, America versus Vietnam, North versus South, truth versus propaganda…The Sympathizer makes you question what people are really fighting for, and the fine line between right and wrong, loyalty and betrayal, friends and enemies.