Reviews with content warning for Racial slurs - The Sympathizer

Reviews tagging 'Racial slurs'

The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen

42 reviews

merle98's review against another edition

adventurous challenging dark informative tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.5

Great book but I am detracting 0.5 stars for the fact that every single female character in the book is either a food-providing wife/mother, a love interest or sexual partner or being brutally raped/tortured/killed off to advance the male protagonist's plotline (or a mix thereof).

Content Warnings

kshertz's review against another edition

Go to review page

adventurous challenging dark tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.5

The writing is beautiful which is to say, way above my reading/intelligence level. But at the end it does say it’s not for the dominant white groups so that makes sense. It’s not for me. It’s not linear, there’s no way a book about the Vietnam war is going to have a happy ending. But I learned a lot, which is the whole reason to read it and it challenged me. So, I recommend it if you want to be challenged and learn a lot.

Content Warnings

alexhaydon's review against another edition

Go to review page

challenging dark reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

Content Warnings

melf's review against another edition

Go to review page

adventurous challenging dark emotional funny reflective sad tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

this is so dark but soooooo well written and compelling. especially as someone who doesn’t know much about the vietnam war (thanks us education system!) this really brought to light a lot of things that i didn’t know about the war. can definitely see why it won a pulitzer but it was still written by a man and there are some grizzly scenes that i didn’t think were really necessary.

Content Warnings

coley28's review against another edition

Go to review page

dark emotional sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

Content Warnings

fluoresensitive's review against another edition

Go to review page

challenging dark emotional tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

Tw; rape, so ... So many unsettling things
.
.
.
.

Beautifully written, but shockingly anti-Black at times. Not to mention the two rapes that take place, oof.

Content Warnings

maramergens's review against another edition

Go to review page

dark mysterious tense slow-paced

Loveable characters? No

2.0

I can respect a lot of this book, especially the parts about the Asian American experience, but it was gruesome and sad and not very enjoyable to read. I honestly am confused why reviews have it listed as funny, even as a fan of dark humor I didn’t find anything in this book funny at all.

Content Warnings

bookscoffeehayley's review against another edition

Go to review page

challenging dark funny informative tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.5

CW: rape, xenophobia, racial slurs, sexism, homophobia

Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer was such an interesting read. I really enjoyed going into the mind of our unnamed protagonist. The writing style of this book is so wonderful.

This may make me a dumb reader, but it took me a bit to get into a groove with reading this book because there are no quotations. It was jarring at first, but once I got used to it, I started to really enjoy this stylistic decision.

I don’t know a lot about the Vietnam War. I vaguely remember learning about it in the general sense in school, but it always fell at the end of the year and I felt like we rushed through it. This book was an eye-opening novel to read about the war, specifically from the Vietnamese perspective. I’m looking forward to reading the sequel, The Committed that hit shelves earlier this month. I also grabbed Nguyen’s short story collection, The Refugees, from the library and look forward to reading it as well.

Content Warnings

leah_alexandra's review against another edition

Go to review page

challenging dark funny reflective medium-paced

4.0

Nearly 5 stars if not for some spoiler content below. The writing is phenomenal. The narrative is gripping and really creates a sense of forward momentum that makes it hard to put the book down.

This book was 5 stars for me until the scene where the female agent is raped at the end. I fully understand that rape and sexual torture are unfortunately not an uncommon part of military activity, and do not object to depicting that content in books. However, this scene was used as the pivotal event in "helping" the narrator complete his "reeducation," and I am uncomfortable with the use of rape/sexual torture as primarily a device that moves another (male) character's story forward.

Content Warnings

thebookdog's review against another edition

Go to review page

challenging dark funny informative sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.0

** spoiler alert ** Trigger warning: This post contains mentions of rape, sexual assault, and violence.

I finished reading ‘The Sympathizer’ this evening, and I am struggling to process the last couple of chapters. Before I talk about what bothered me, I would like to state for the record that I found the book enlightening, and this is my first ‘Vietnam War Novel’, which I learnt is a genre by itself. The book made me look up, and read more about the Vietnam War, the fall of Saigon, and the draconian acts committed by all sides. Perhaps, the narrator would agree with me for including the expression ‘...by all sides’. The book was what the synopsis promised. In parts, it was a comedy, and in many parts, it was a tragedy. The writing burned with the fire of creativity. Until I started reading the last few chapters, I almost had no complaints. But what bothered me almost at the end was how a rape was written.

Here is some context: the nameless narrator of the novel fought with the Auteur (a filmmaker in the novel) with all his soul, about the inclusion of a rape scene in the movie that was being made on the Vietnam War. I found myself rooting for the narrator because I thought he made a valid point about the way the rape was portrayed in the movie, and above all, he questioned the need to include such a scene in the first place for mere shock value. While the narrator was a man of questionable character, his question was the most reasonable. So, what shocked me was the author, who —through the narrator — reprimanded Hollywood for exploiting wars, and their portrayal of the oppressed, and the survivors, included a chapter at the end in which a Communist agent was raped. As an involved reader, I didn’t find that decision of this author’s very different from the Auteur’s. I was appalled even more by that chapter in which the rape was narrated from a man’s point of view, and it was not much different from how the rape scene was shot for the movie. The chapter and the scene were classic examples of men’s one-dimensional understanding of rape.

I read many reviews, but there wasn’t any mention about this particular chapter. So, I extended my search using a particular set of key words, and I stumbled upon this article. https://www.publicbooks.org/rememberi...

Here is an excerpt:
The interviewer: ‘The Sympathizer’ ends with a rape scene. What are the ethics of including rape as a plot point in a novel?

The author: The novel is divided into two parts: the first part is the farce, and the second part is the tragedy. The farce ends with the making of the movie in the Philippines, which includes a rape scene. It’s filmed during that time period, but it’s a delayed mechanism in the novel: we don’t get to see that until later, and it’s also a foreshadowing of what’s going to happen in the narrator’s own mind. I wanted to put the cinematic rape in there because those things happen in the American imagination of the war, and I find them very problematic.

This exposes me to a reasonable criticism: if you found it to be so problematic in Hollywood films, why did you replicate it in your novel, both in terms of depicting it cinematically and in the plot of your own novel, in the narrator’s story as well? That’s a very good question, and a very good criticism. I felt that I needed to include those scenes because of the character that I had constructed, and because of the spy narrative that I had chosen. The Sympathizer is a first-person narrative from the point of view of someone who is very masculine, very misogynistic, very sexist. From his point of view, there would be no way to depict something like this that would offer a critical take on the rape, so the reader just has to see it happen.

Why did it have to be rape? Could I have chosen something else? Two-thirds of the way through the novel, I realized who my narrator was. I liked him a lot, even though he was a complicated character. But I also had to understand that he was misogynistic and masculine, and that I was enjoying that as a writer, which made me question why I was enjoying that as a writer. I wanted to show that the misogyny and the sexism that he takes pleasure in, which some readers presumably also take pleasure in, exists on a spectrum.

At one extreme of that is going to be the most atrocious expression of masculinity and misogyny, which is sexual violence. He had to be confronted with that, I had to be confronted with that, and readers who took pleasure in the objectification of women that he participates in had to be confronted with that. Once I had made certain formal decisions—spy novel, first-person narration, masculine and misogynist narrator—a rape was, I felt, the logical conclusion. If I didn’t go there, I would be making a mistake, and if I did go there, I would be making a lot of people uncomfortable—but that is actually what they should feel.

End of excerpt.

There are quite a few problems with the author’s view. My main problem though is the readers, who are misogynistic, sexist, and masculine would forget the rape just like the nameless narrator who had conveniently pushed the memory to the darkest part of his mind. Even after encountering such a cruel act, during his time in the USA, he continued to objectify women, including his quasi love-interest Sofia, and the General’s daughter Lana. Despite being a witness of a woman being dehumanised, the character arc proves that the nameless narrator didn’t change for the better. His resistance to not include the rape scene in the movie, now I realise, was his feeble effort to absolve himself of the guilt that he was harbouring, and not because he found the portrayal of women problematic. So, the author’s decision to include the rape at the end comes across as an element included for shock value, and that makes me sad. As a reader, as a woman, I place a lot of faith in politically sensitive authors like Viet Thanh Nguyen, but they continue to fail me when it comes to representation. Like the nameless narrator who failed to get the right representation for his people in the movie that the Auteur made, the author failed as well.

Content Warnings

More...