The Sympathizer
Viet Thanh Nguyen (2015)
“A Communist spy embedded in the South Vietnamese army confesses everything — but to whom, and why, you won't know until the end.”
At a Glance
An unnamed Vietnamese narrator, a Communist sleeper agent working as aide-de-camp to a South Vietnamese general, flees Saigon's fall in 1975 and resettles in Los Angeles. He continues spying for the North while navigating exile, complicity in murders he opposed, and a Hollywood film that reduces his people to caricature. Captured after a failed reinfiltration mission to Vietnam, he endures reeducation torture that dismantles his sense of self — until he arrives at the only answer his interrogators will accept: nothing.
Read full summary →Why This Book Matters
First novel by a Vietnamese-American author to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (2016). The Sympathizer broke into a literary tradition that had, for forty years, represented the Vietnam War almost exclusively through American protagonists. It shifted the center of gravity of an entire genre by telling the story from the Vietnamese side — and then complicating that by making the Vietnamese narrator also a Communist spy, refusing any simple moral reversal.
Diction Profile
Elevated literary prose with ironic distance — postcolonial English that knows its own history as a colonial language
High