The Sympathizer

384 pages

Published Nov. 13, 2015 by Grove Atlantic.

ISBN:
978-0-8021-9169-4
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4 stars (3 reviews)

14 editions

Moral tension

5 stars

The unnamed narrator is a mole for the Communist North in the South Vietnamese military. Unlike a lot of spy novels, the tension in this book is all about the narrator trying to be two different moral people, not a spy who tries not to be discovered. As a mole, he does terrible things to people on both sides of the conflict. He is also the son of a French man and Vietnamese woman, which brings its own tension. After they evacuate and become refugees in the U.S., he has to negotiate between being Vietnamese and American expectations and views. All of these pull him in brilliantly written fashion in multiple directions. It's rare that I get this engaged with a book where the tension is primarily internal, but it pulled me in so much I missed a Muni stop even. There's a few scenes of action, but the tough …

Review of "The Sympathizer"

4 stars

4 stars: loved this book, would recommend

I read this in like two days, first book in a while I've had trouble putting down. It had the constant tension I associate with a spy novel, but was a lot more introspective. I found it to be a pretty quick read for its length and for its literary-novel-ness, though the lack of quotation marks tripped me up a few times.

I saw some review describe it as "cynical" but I thought it was actually fairly optimistic, given the subject matter. I think it accurately describes the state of the world and am surprised that anything in there would be surprising in the year 2024, but there is a theme of a strange kind of hope in it. Every character is deeply flawed, but not absolved of the responsibility to do the right thing. The spy as protagonist, the "sympathizer", also lets …