Reviews with content warning for Body horror - The Sympathizer

it's extraordinary that this is nguyen's first novel, for the sympathizer is a blistering tale that examines dual worlds and perspectives, while also being a memorable story about friendship, all helmed by an unforgettable narrative voice.

tbh i dont feel qualified to critique this book, for it's obvious that its story, construction, ideas, and author operate on a higher plane entirely. i cant offer sh!t to it, only it to me, and boy it certainly does. what truly distinguishes the novel is its incisive dissection of identity and politics, as well as its ability to read america - w/ its contradictions, hypocrisy, iniquitous superiority - to absolute filth. i literally lost count of the quotes i like, so unstoppably the book barrels on from one thing to another, giving voice to truths most american readers harbor only in their subconscious or are overly accustomed to as to now be oblivious to them.

aside from its themes and msgs, the story also stands well on its own. im surprised by how touching the self-labeled three musketeers' friendship is, and i cant rmb the last time male friendship moves me this much, this one bc of its devotion and mental sacrifice. my fav thing abt this book, however, def has got to be the unnamed narrator's voice, so genuinely funny yet oft dark. the way he says, describes, compares things are simply humorous, while also offering a deeper look into his character. it might not be a LOL kinda humor, but it's endlessly snort- and chuckle-inducing for sure, which is quite a feat in such a dark novel.

this novel isnt for those averse to serious subject matter, and some are advised to stay far away bc it can veer into macabre territory very quickly esp towards the end. but for those who can stomach the aforementioned, the book will reward u w/ a thought-provoking and truth-spilling story told thru an oft humorous and equally melancholic voice.

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fongyay's review against another edition

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medium-paced

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

3.0

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kshertz's review

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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.

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alexhaydon's review against another edition

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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

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hanna_'s review

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challenging dark emotional sad slow-paced

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

2.0

This book was full of dense and confusing prose, it felt like the author was choosing words just to show off his vocabulary and not because they were good descriptions. I found the plot hard to follow, and the dramatic tone shift at the end off putting. I have never shouted “eww!” out loud so many times while reading a book. It was full of unnecessarily graphic depictions of sexual topics, pedophilic fantasies, rape, bestiality/necrophilia (wish I could unread chapter 6), bowel movements, etc that did not add anything to the plot. The only things I liked was learning a bit about the Vietnam war.

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diameters's review

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challenging dark reflective sad medium-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? It's complicated

spoilers

i don't know where to begin with this book. i read it piecewise, the same way i did toni morrison's beloved, and how apt a comparison i think that is, as morrison herself is brought up as a direct reference in the tail-end essays written by nguyen. this novel is brutal and unforgiving and full of quiet pity for those who did not deserve their fate, and even some of those who did. the sympathizer is about war the way that the bible is about the nails in the hands of christ. it aches with a terrible human misery, in both the parts i could sympathize with and the parts i could empathize with.

by pairing the mundane with the horrific, nguyen develops a war through the life of just our unnamed narrator, and nurses it to life with a bitter yet reminiscent, hindsight-driven gaze. most of the book, the beautiful part of it at least, is told as a first-person confession and is lyrical in tone, tinged with nostalgia and appreciation and indulgence. the narrator is in turn wry, self-pitying, self-aware, and blind, and the novel spans his life in irregular jumps, hyper-fixating on brief periods of his experiences and then passing months by in the room of a paragraph, the way that memory operates. he remembers the important parts, and he replays those over and over again until they shine with unearned detail, like the third eye of a man his best friend shot dead, or the spittle flecking the chin of a communist agent with a thin sliver of paper hiding in her mouth.

what is confessed is brutal, and i am deeply convinced with the way that nguyen sets up consequences in his writing, both plot-wise and narratively. no death is meaningless, unless you argue that all deaths are meaningless, which is a sentiment our captain himself struggles with. the greatest weight is given to the deaths that the captain himself features in: the crapulent major and sonny become key fixtures in the narrative's development, becoming omnipresent in their death and in the captain's crushing guilt. i have never read anything more devastating than sonny's beloved speech about ms. mori to our narrator minutes before he was shot, eight or nine times. at first, i found it unbelievable and unreasonably timed (seconds before his death, he just so happened to change his entire life philosophy, and also felt the need to share with a mild acquaintance? isn't this pixar levels of tear-jerking?) but the more i thought about it, the more i realized that through the lens of someone's memory, the things he said would be distilled into the most impactful and painful for the captain to remember. through his guilt, our narrator represents sonny as the lover, the dreamer, as a man who came around for sofia and found someone he wanted to spend the rest of his life with, and no doubt guilt colored the way that the captain wrote about his final, fatal interaction with sonny. the things that would haunt him (sonny himself, for that matter) are the things that hurt the most, and him writing down only the most brutal things, one sentence of condemnation after another, may not have been the most accurate representation of sonny's words, but they are the most accurate representation of how a tortured man would remember his own reprehensible actions.

from a writing perspective, though, turning sonny and the crapulent major into ghosts was a fascinating choice, turning them in central characters posthumously. they coincide with the slow degradation of the captain's mind, but are dealt little attention at first. nguyen emphasizes over and over the acceptance of ghosts in vietnamese culture, and treats the reader as understanding of such, bringing in ghosts offhandedly as a natural step. i don't believe their existence quite crosses the novel into magical realism or fantasy/horror at all, because they're a direct, heavy-handed symbol of guilt, almost a christmas carol-like in their style of haunting, but the way the narrator is at resigned peace with them is new. he doesn't fear them the way western protagonists react to ghosts, but instead feels sorrow and personal culpability for them. the idea that they too are stuck with him and not choosing to haunt him in particular is damningly painful: sonny quietly laments that the captain whom he hates most is the one that he appears to, while sofia mori whom he loves most is unreachable.

other deaths leave their marks on the characters as well. early on, duc and linh's death transform the newly-introduced bon from the self-assured, trained soldier into a vindictive alcoholic, but there is an equal argument that it was not their deaths that changed him, but that this side of him was actively being repressed when he was with them. his character unfolds more even though we learn of him more through the aftermath of who he was than who he is now, creating a sense of dissonance when bon as a cold-blooded assassin is only retroactively introduced, long after the image of bon the shattered, grieving man is cemented.

i do wish the backstory of man, bon, and our captain was constructed more solidly, because although the scene of them drinking and the story of their childhood fight are vivid and established well, the friendship is a central tenant of the beginning and one that is incredibly tested at the end and in my opinion, deserved a little more attention to its foundation in order to more credibly sell its fallout. man in particular i believed needed just a bit more fleshing out, especially as i found myself struggling to fit a motivation to the madness that resulted at the end. i guessed the plot twist very early on, not because it was obvious but because it felt inevitable when a character as exalted as man was vanished from the narrative. i felt that the interactions between man and our captain during his torture were a little more performative than the rest of the novel had felt, and i think that could be traced back to the fact that while bon and the captain's friendship was solidified in vietnam, man and the captain's friendship was mostly centered around the revolution and not each other.

in that vein, the entire ending was. jarring. horrifying. almost shock-value based, at some points. a endless slew of misery, stretching on for chapters and only broken up by various shifts in perspectives. first person to third to first person plural, omniescent, although i think the last shift was effective, turning the two halves of the captain's mind and body into the diaspora of the vietnamese people, refugees and soldiers alive, echoing the one sentiment that could be feasibly shared between both the vc and the regime. \

i don't know where else to put this, because i didn't outline this horrifically long ramble but: the way that nguyen depicts how everyone can be bought and sold with their own price, whether it be through actual monetary bribery or through flattery, in the moments where our narrator analyzes a man's motivations and plays to his deepest desires through speech or lies or any of the other non-violent tools claude teaches him during interrogation class.

as much as this novel is about the vietnamese, as nguyen himself describes, it is far more clearly a vietnamese-american novel. the eloquence and lucidity with which the sympathizer deals with the experience of assimilating or even existing in a country like america as an asian refugee or immigrant or even citizen strikes a chord with me, unsurprisingly. nguyen addresses america with the critical eye of a neutral third party, the way the captain would be, unscrupulously pointing out its promises and wonders and lies and hypocrisies, its thick tongue and wandering eyes, its hunger for foreign countries and its inability to love anyone but itself. characters like the academic officer, the auteur, the congressman, and richard hedd display the degrees to which the enlightened white man considers and appreciates the so-called "oriental"—a clumsy racist convinced of his benefaction and moral superiority, with the excuse/pardon of "my wife is an oriental"; an artist who uses asians as tools and plot-points, as savages frothing at the mouth or innocents in desperate need of a white savior, creating political propanda and feeding stereotypes in one fell, action-packed swoop; a shrewd businessman aiming to gain future votes of a minority group who have need their own political puppets, who says one line in vietnamese and "wins the hearts of new saigon"; and finally, the intellectual whose opinion, the captain realizes, will always be held above his one simply on account of the fact that richard hedd is an immigrant, yes, but an english immigrant. the indoctrination of the american dream is a deep theme of this book, and what has stuck with me was the comparison of it to the lottery. there is no guarantee of happiness, but there is the guarantee of an opportunity to receive happiness. coming to america is akin to buying a ticket, and as the captain puts it, millions of the vietnamese would kill for a ticket.

again, because this isn't an academic paper, i have no idea how to transition into a new topic, but i think the depiction of women in this novel is worth a discussion. i'm not yet sure how to feel about the way nguyen relegates them to mostly sex symbols and victims: madame and ms. mori and lana have their own thoughts and motivations, yes, but their primary use is to teach the narrator a lesson through their bodies and surface experiences. linh and his mother are both self-sacrificing mother figures who don't really move the narrative forward in any meaningful way. one argument for this is that the narrator himself is a misogynist, but leaving it otherwise unaddressed in the first place makes that feel like a j.k. rowling retcon, or an attempt to save his ass. as much as i enjoyed the indulgent language of the book, leaving three-five chapters describing the way he fucked lana and then "learned" and was rejected by the general for daring to have sex with a woman is nauseating at best. i know i spent so long philosophizing on the way that nguyen was able to capture the most miserable parts of the vietnamese war, but the graphic rape scene and following torture/confession elements were neither realistic nor narratively necessary; they felt gratuitous and dark for the sake of being a "war novel".

in general, i enjoyed the war novel parts far, far less than i enjoyed the more human aspects of the book. i think nguyen has a genuine voice in developing the pain of the asian-american experience, the inherent, unchangeable alienation and white fascination. the analysis of the human character and american culture was invaluable and beautifully done, i think. philosophy features heavy in the rhetoric of the novel, and chapters at a time felt like lessons in moral discussions. not a bad thing at all, but they clearly outshone the more action-heavy, traditional parts of the story. the conversation at the table with richard hedd is one of the highlights of the novel in my opinion, as was the outlandish but poignant experience with the Auteur, and the subsequent failure of the narrator to make a difference. nguyen makes the immigrant experience feel suffocating, the way it often does for immigrants, without whitewashing the "potential opportunities!" for a western audience. in its own way, though, this at time can feel like pity porn. i've yet to truly come up with an opinion on it, but at times it resonates and at other times it tugs so hard at my heartstrings that i get kinda sick of it.

overall, though. brutal. brutal, terrible, unreasonable, excessive, fantastic. i need to think about this one some more, and that's a sign that it was worth reading.

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