The Sympathizer

The unnamed narrator is a mole for the Communist North in the South Vietnamese military. Unlike a lot of spy novels, the tension in this book is all about the narrator trying to be two different moral people, not a spy who tries not to be discovered. As a mole, he does terrible things to people on both sides of the conflict. He is also the son of a French man and Vietnamese woman, which brings its own tension. After they evacuate and become refugees in the U.S., he has to negotiate between being Vietnamese and American expectations and views. All of these pull him in brilliantly written fashion in multiple directions. It's rare that I get this engaged with a book where the tension is primarily internal, but it pulled me in so much I missed a Muni stop even. There's a few scenes of action, but the tough stuff is in our protagonist's inner monologue.

@sanae@bookwyrm.social has a much meatier review of The Sympathizer than mine; go read their review for a deeper discussion of the book's ethics.

4 stars: loved this book, would recommend

I read this in like two days, first book in a while I've had trouble putting down. It had the constant tension I associate with a spy novel, but was a lot more introspective. I found it to be a pretty quick read for its length and for its literary-novel-ness, though the lack of quotation marks tripped me up a few times.

I saw some review describe it as "cynical" but I thought it was actually fairly optimistic, given the subject matter. I think it accurately describes the state of the world and am surprised that anything in there would be surprising in the year 2024, but there is a theme of a strange kind of hope in it. Every character is deeply flawed, but not absolved of the responsibility to do the right thing. The spy as protagonist, the "sympathizer", also lets you look at and understand the motivations of all the different sides in this war, not just as ideologies but also as people, and even when the motivations are actually deeply unsympathetic, most of the characters do seem very human (my one criticism is that this is a lot more true of the men than of the women). I also saw a review describe it as "funny" and that is probably not the first adjective I'd use, like it's not wrong but it is not the type of book you read if you want something funny.

It touched on a lot of subjects that I now consider kind of cliché in immigrant stories, but which were done so well that I did not feel that at all. Like the whole "stuck between two worlds" thing felt a bit more fresh, maybe because it did not buy into the model minority myth at all or discuss it at all. I guess making the protagonist a communist helps there, no pressure to be a doctor or lawyer. Some other reviews on other websites said it dragged in the middle part, but that was my favourite part. It was also a rare example of a mixed race Asian protagonist, and while some things did not quite ring true to my experience (though my background is otherwise quite different), its tendency to lean on stereotypes there didn't bother me too much and overall I thought it was much better written than such things usually are.

I haven't read a lot of spy novels and usually think of like, James Bond. I like that the protagonist is not a particularly tough guy and that he struggles with every aspect of being a spy in the ways that I think a real person would. In particular I liked the theme of the careful managing and splitting of identities. An obvious theme in a spy novel but I think one that also rings true to anyone who finds themselves, as the cliche goes, between worlds in some ways.

It is pretty graphic, though it only felt gratuitous in a few places - one particular scene I kind of rolled my eyes at.

Content warnings: some fairly graphic sexual assault, torture, murder, implied child sexual abuse. Racism (aimed towards the protagonist), misogyny (largely from the protagonist). Uh. bestiality?

Nothing!

I so wanted that word, perhaps repeated a few times, to be my whole review--the word that torture enlightens us to because when faced with it we just want everything to go away. Still, consciousness is the problem and nothingness the solution and a sympathizer, especially one who is educated and intelligent has way too much consciousness, suffering not only for himself but for others, the objects of his sympathy. Instead he is repeatedly forced to choose sides and sometimes kill those he sympathizes with, or at the very least doing nothing to stop those on his side from doing so.

The secret of fighting a war is to be unsympathetic. Ideology needs to replace sympathy; the ideology of people who are like you. Unfortunately, no one is like the Captain, the confessor, the bastard, the unnamed narrator. He fits in nowhere, he is accepted by no one. This time of identity politics when it's all about being part of some group, is also a time of polarization and dividedness. The ultimate aim of belonging is to wage war against those who do not belong.

There are no good guys in this novel, the closest to one being Sonny, whom he is ordered to kill, but that's part of the point. There is always some crime to confess.

In the end, our sympathizer remains a revolutionary, but one in search of a revolution. If it's not too paradoxical, perhaps that will be an uprising of sympathizers who will defeat the ideologues.

The Hegelian concept that no conflict is ever right against wrong, but right against right, is a mainstay of any freshman philosophy class, and maybe 19-year-old me would have had my mind blown by this novel. As it was, it came across as an overlong explanation of the point that any view can be right or wrong depending on the way you frame it, and the ability to sympathize with individuals on either side is the key to seeing both viewpoints. If this point had been the basis of a more interesting plot -- it REALLY dragged in the middle -- or characters I actually cared about, maybe I would have liked it better. The story up until they leave Saigon is fascinating, and setting the novel entirely in Vietnam would have been a better choice. I also found the prose and lack of quotation marks (yes, I know that's the popular thing now) exhausting. Obviously I'm missing whatever the Pulitzer committee saw in it, but I wouldn't recommend it.