The Sympathizer is a scintillating read, having for its narrator a Communist spy with impeccable wit and a sense of irony so dry it will catch fire in the most humid of Vietnamese weather. It definitely brims with style. Yet I am not sure I am convinced by the climax it arcs towards, the “confession” tortured out of him reminiscent of Orwell’s 1984‘s own confession scene.
Chronologically, The Sympathizer starts from the end of the Vietnam war in 1975, as the General that the narrator works for and spies on prepares to abscond to America following the fall of Saigon to communist forces. It isn’t an easy read — most of it is told as an autobiographical recount after the fact, with dialogue presented as statements rather than verbal action enclosed by quotation marks, and given the narrator’s intellectual bend, interspersed with metatextual reflections that never allow the reader to immerse comfortably in the narrated circumstances. It’s also about a lot of things: political ideology (although less than you might expect), brotherhood, displacement, non-belonging, guilt over complicity in racism against your own race, guilt over murder.
How does one maintain sanity through a war, in which you are both sides at once? For the narrator, whom we only know as Captain, it was with his sense of irony, in seeing both what things purport to mean, and what they really mean, and finding the black humour in it. Yet in America, faced with a paranoid General determined to test his loyalty, an overwhelming feeling of alienation and purposelessness in a foreign land, and a loss of emotional support from his bosom friend and fellow communist Man, the Captain finds himself clinging to the one person he knows does matter: Bon, the last member of the trio and a brother despite their difference in ideology, and makes a blind decision to follow him back towards Vietnam and certain death.
So far so good — even as this makes for an increasingly sobering read as the Captain spirals further into a kind of despair. The book does an excellent job rendering the immigrant community’s frustration at being relegated to menial or service jobs, their desperation for any sign of home, predominantly food, their sense of isolation, their attempts to adjust to life in America — and unease when they do adjust, because it signifies a distancing from their roots. It is from the capture of the Captain and the rest of the suicidal anti-communist squad (who are on this mission largely because of a loss of meaning and debilitating feelings of powerlessness outside of their roles as soldiers) by the communists that the narrative thrust became less satisfying for me.
Spoilers: In terms of the communists’ motivations, knowing that the Captain was ostensibly one of them, even as his conviction was wavering, what was the function of the confession? There was a sense that the emotional stakes were being driven up; a repressed memory of a torture of a communist was uncovered, with the Captain a coward of a bystander who did not prevent the act. This was one of the aims of the confession, but not the ultimate one — when the Captain broke, it was in recognising a philosophy of nihilism, and this was the answer that finally satisfied the Commissar.
Our commandant was a man who didn’t get the joke, and people who do not get the joke are dangerous people indeed. They are the ones who say nothing with great piousness, who ask everyone else to die for nothing, who revere nothing.
But isn’t this a little too in-your-face — that war is driven mostly by those with flat certainties, and is senseless whichever side you are on? My main discomfort with the narrative is my sense that the ending tried to tie things up in too naked a fashion, and the intensity of the action was amped up for the sake of it.
In summary: The Sympathizer is smartly written, yet in a way that is too self-aware to be touching for me.
Rating: 4/5
— The Sympathizer (Viet Thanh Nguyen, 2015)
Melody stays a child 