The Sympathiser by Viet Thanh Nguyen
A quarter of the way through, I found this book felt entirely different from other books about the Vietnam War that I’ve encountered in the Anglosphere. Which makes sense when you consider that Viet Thanh Nguyen is a Vietnamese-American whose family fled Saigon during its fall in 1975. This book is not merely a well-meaning outsider’s interpretation of the zeitgeist, but that of someone much closer to the historical wound itself. The authenticity is immediately apparent, though I can’t quite articulate what exactly makes it feel so different—maybe it’s simply that Vietnamese voices have been largely historically absent from these narratives in the West.
The narrator’s opinionated voice is what grabbed me immediately and pulled me into the book with him. Sardonic, intellectual, and deeply critical of American intervention and religion to the point it bleeds from the page and permeates his every thought. His observations about American contradictions are sharp, yet he remains sanctimoniously incognisant of his own. Eventually, his smugness began to grate on me, his critiques packaged in the arrogance of youth, with the air of being the only one who gets the joke. As he carried himself with the dangerous conviction of anyone armed with an ideology, I found myself thinking that he reminded me of a younger, more self-righteous version of myself (which explains why it was so irritating).
But something interesting occurred just before the halfway mark of the book. The narrative was transmuting from darkly funny to funnily dark, and eventually just dark. My irritation evolved into sympathy as I watched his certainty crumble, like watching his smile fade to grimace in real time, and I found myself no longer irritated, but rather more invested in his story, his worldview being dismantled piece by piece. Usually, I read before bed in the hopes of getting relaxed and sleepy, but somewhere along the line the book betrayed my routine and held my sleep hostage, keeping my attention (convenient for the book, but not so much for my wellbeing). There are scenes (which I won’t spoil) that push the narrator in directions he himself naively doesn’t expect, and I found myself curious as to how far he’d follow these uncomfortable revelations.
What strikes me most about Nguyen is his authorial neutrality despite the narrator’s clear political leanings. Each and every critique feels balanced against the natural consequences of being aligned with anything, and nothing is romanticised, nothing gets a free pass. That said, I can sense the author’s personal frustrations seeping through the text (the historical silencing or negligence of Vietnamese voices) without feeling lectured, which is no small feat. He plays with the motif of identity delicately, allowing me (someone far removed from the 1970s diaspora of Vietnam) to find company among the universality of being a black sheep.
The narrator sees himself as a “man of two minds,” thinking it gives him special insight, but what we can see as readers that he cannot, is that there are infinitely more than two sides to any story. His worldview, though idealistic and romanticised, is simultaneously too narrow and too cynical, and watching him grapple with this creates an intriguing tension.
I’m still not entirely sure how I feel about the book (I rarely understand my thoughts until I’ve had time to digest), but it’s the kind of book that knows how to make me genuinely uncomfortable in moments, which I suspect is entirely intentional. Nguyen knows how to evoke an image that lingers, how to make you feel complicit in ways you didn’t expect, and his writing manages to be somehow witty and serious concomitantly. Satirical yet philosophical, crude yet subtle, sophisticated without being pretentious. Well, I suppose I’ll see how I feel after a few weeks of distance from the book now that I’m finished.