The Sympathizer

Woah okay I don't know where to begin in writing about Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Sympathizer. Alright, the basics: it was structured as a confession of a political prisoner. But it was more than just a confession - it was a war novel and a portrait of Vietnamese-Americans, and it was so beautifully written. Truly, the structure in itself was wonderful... even though it was structured as a confession, it moved so smoothly through the main character's story. And there were so many pages I bookmarked with quotes I loved (always a sign of a good book). Here's one I loved early on (no spoilers!), when the protagonist comments on prostitutes and American soldiers in Vietnam:

Most were poor, illiterate country girls with no means of making a living except to live as ticks on the fur of the nineteen-year-old American GI. His pants bulging with an inflationary roll of dollars and his adolescent brain swollen with the yellow fever that afflicts so many Western men who come to an Asian country, this American GI discovered to his surprise and delight that in this green-breasted world he was no longer Clark Kent, but Superman, at least in regards to women. (38)

And it's these astute observations of Americanism from the perspective of a Vietnamese man -- as he writes later on (sorry, I can't help but quote this book - it was just SO well written): immigrants "are the greatest anthropologists ever of the American people." (258) There were three things that I loooooved about the book: the ending (a bad ending can truly ruin a good novel), the voice of the main character, and the historicity within which the story was rooted. This book deservedly won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in fiction - and I'm still not over the fact that it was Viet Thanh Nguyen's debut novel. Okay, one more passage, when a woman instructs the main character to claim his identity as Vietnamese American:

And Vietnamese American, not Vietnamese. You must claim America, she said. America will not give itself to you. If you do not claim America, if America is not in your heart, America will throw you into a concentration camp or a reservation or a plantation. And then, if you have not claimed America, where will you go? (274)

To me, the Sympathizer was Nguyen claiming his identity and amplifying a voice - that of the Vietnamese Americans, that of the Vietnamese refugees - that is often sorely missing from the narrative of the Vietnam War. Rating: ★★★★★