“A communist double agent embedded in the South Vietnamese intelligence services flees with the South Vietnamese government to Los Angeles in April 1975. Pulitzer Prize 2016.”
What's in this book
- Viet Thanh Nguyen's 2015 debut — a communist double agent flees with the South Vietnamese government to Los Angeles
- Pulitzer Prize winner 2016; canonical contemporary Vietnamese-American literary novel
- 384 pages of sustained first-person confession addressed to an unnamed interrogator
- 2024 HBO / A24 Park Chan-wook / Robert Downey Jr. limited series adaptation is one of the strongest of recent memory
- Francois Chau audiobook is the definitive audio production
- For readers of On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, The Refugees, and contemporary Vietnamese-American literary fiction
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The Sympathizer is Viet Thanh Nguyen's 2015 debut novel, the Pulitzer Prize winner of 2016 and the canonical contemporary Vietnamese-American literary novel. The structural premise is the confession of an unnamed narrator (called only the Captain) who is a North Vietnamese communist double agent embedded since the 1950s in the South Vietnamese intelligence services. The novel opens with the fall of Saigon in April 1975 and the Captain's escape with the South Vietnamese general and his family to a Los Angeles refugee community. The Captain continues to report back to his Hanoi handler while embedded with the General's exile cell, eventually accompanying the General's daughter on a guerrilla incursion back into Vietnam.
Nguyen's structural method is the sustained first-person confession addressed throughout to an unnamed Vietnamese interrogator we eventually learn is the Captain's North Vietnamese handler and superior officer. The first-person Captain voice is one of the most carefully constructed in contemporary American literary fiction; the narrator's formal training in American intelligence-services rhetoric, his French-Catholic education, his half-French paternity, and his lifelong commitment to the communist cause produce a voice that can speak fluently in all four registers within a single paragraph. The Hollywood chapters in the middle third (the Captain consults on a Vietnam War film clearly modeled on Apocalypse Now) are some of the strongest contemporary American literary prose about how the Vietnam War has been memorialized in American culture. The novel's back third sequence in the Hanoi re-education camp delivers the structural payoff the entire confession has been building toward.
Recommended as required contemporary American literary fiction reading, as the right Nguyen entry point, and as one of the canonical contemporary American novels about the Vietnam War from the Vietnamese side. Read The Refugees (2017, the short story collection) and The Committed (2021, the direct sequel) next. The Francois Chau audiobook is the definitive audio production. Five stars without reservation.
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