On impulse, I decided to join the local library's book club and this was October's selection, so I picked it up on one of my many trips there. Upon scanning the back summary I thought, "This is going to be some heavy shit," and promptly procrastinated in reading it to protect My Feelings for a while longer. While I wasn't wrong, this book is much more than an unrelenting shitshow of the horrors of war & the heavy toll of espionage - it's funny as hell too. To sum up The Sympathizer briefly and inadequately, it is a confessional novel written by an unnamed NVA spy working in the ranks of the South Vietnamese Army, starting with the official end of the war in 1975 and moving through his life as a refugee in America and then back to Vietnam once more. My fellow bookclub members mentioned how difficult they found getting started, but I was hooked from the very first.

Viet Thanh Nguyen mentions that he wanted everyone complicit in the war (French, American, Vietnamese) to be held accountable in this narrative and boy howdy, he held nothing back. Zero chill, no one was safe and it was amazing. I'm American with a dim view of how our government polices the world, so perhaps I am a more receptive audience to commentary like this:

But I was one of the unfortunate [refugees] who could not help but wonder whether my need for American charity was due to my having first been the recipient of American aid.

While most people I have spoken to about this novel were taken by the feeling of being nothing, the narrative of The Other, the Captain's inability to find a comfortable place to straddle his many worlds, I was more drawn to idea that was espoused by Mao and repeated by the Captain: "Art could not be separated from politics and politics needed art in order to reach the people where they lived, through entertaining them." Separating art from artist (and thus their ideals & politics) has always been a struggle of mine because I'm never sure if I should. This is exemplified when the Captain becomes a consultant on a famous Auteur's film about the war, ostensibly to provide realism and representation to the Vietnamese actors, only to realize he's played into their game without any hope of bringing about effective change. The Hollywood machine cranks on, warts (racism, sexism, homophobia) and all.

The Sympathizer is just a WOW book, but I find myself struggling to define all the ways I enjoyed it. I did, though, and I think everyone should give it a whirl. Even if, like me, you're not super informed about the particulars of the Vietnam War, you won't be lost.

I'm both ready and wary for the sequel. The author says:

“I realized [the narrator is] a misogynist and I’m enjoying writing from the viewpoint of a misogynist, so what does it mean about him and what does it mean about me?” he said. “The sequel will still be very much about revolution, politics, ideology and commitment, but also about sexuality and masculinity – his, but also mine too, and that’s not something that I’ve thought about too extensively in my life and I need to grapple with these issues much more explicitly in the sequel."

I'm interested to see how how he pulls this off as a man writing the journey, since he never explicitly states that the Captain will change his views. The Captain clearly thought himself as a progressive man in regards to women, which means he would never believe there's anything to change. His treatment of women, through thoughts and deeds and microaggresions, was the biggest thing that held me back when it comes to becoming a sympathizer (hah!) toward his character. Time will tell.