Viet Thanh Nguyen, "The Sympathizer"

The Sympathizer (2015) is the first of the half dozen novels I selected to read from the NY Times list of the 100 best books of the century so far. The Sympathizer won the Pulitzer Prize in 2016 and I remember being intrigued by it at the time. So when the list reminded me, I got an audio copy, very well read by François Chau.

I liked it. There were parts that irritated me, as I will explain, but on the whole it is a high-quality book about a fascinating topic: how a Vietnamese or Vietnamese American person in our day might think about the Vietnam war.

Our anonymous narrator seems to stand in for Vietnam. He is the bastard son of a French priest and and Vietnamese peasant woman; he worked in the South's military intelligence, but was a North Vietnamese spy. He is, he keeps saying, a "man of two minds," and he sees everything from both sides. He grew up poor, giving us flashbacks of rural poverty, but later served as the personal assistant to an important general, which shows us a bit of life among the southern elite. When Saigon falls in 1975, the narrator's controllers order him to join the exodus from the South so that he can spy on the Vietnamese community in the US.

It was the US part that I found rather irritating. Part of it was yet another immigrant saga that I felt like I had read ten times before, and rather less interesting than some. There is also some grousing about white people being racist against Asians, a phenomenon that may exist at some level but has had absolutely zero impact on the prospects of Asian Americans, who are thriving by every measure.  Nguyen's immigrants seemed to me to be doing really well, especially considering that they were just airlifted from a collapsing nation to a new continent. What is good about this section is the depiction of the listlessness that overtook many new arrivals; they were able to find jobs and apartments, but not purpose, so they spent a lot of time just hanging  around, drinking heavily and talking about the old country. Also interesting on the role of music in memory and nostalgia.

In the final section the narrator returns to Vietnam and ends up in a re-education camp. This was, to me, where the book really soars, and I forgave all its stumbles because of the powerful climax. The narrator is forced to meditate over and over on the famous saying of Ho Chi Minh, "Nothing is more precious than freedom and independence." But what does "nothing" mean? Is this perhaps a profoundly ambiguous statement, depending on how one reads it? And it is, after all, ultimately a slogan, and after being "civilized" by the French and "defended" by the Americans, Vietnamese people know better than anyone that slogans are merely "empty suits draped over the corpse of an idea." Why had so many died over these empty suits? What was it all for?

Highly recommended.