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A review by bmunsh
The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen
challenging
dark
emotional
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.5
Graphic: Violence and Rape
First and foremost, Viet Nguyen has an incredible grasp of prose and the English language. Very concise, witty, humorous, and playful, without really pushing that boundary of becoming overly verbose. Although, being overly verbose does become a point later, in the commandant's review of the protagonist’s self-crit.
Overall, it’s an extremely strong novel on the conflicting nature of the protagonist, in both his physical self and personal beliefs.
My only real criticisms are
1) The US and South Vietnamese armies are let off pretty easily. This is the point, that the protagonist has suppressed the atrocities he witnessed, but a naive reader may only takeaway north=reeducation=bad, individual American soldiers committing war crimes=bad. I think there is an excellent analysis via parallelism in the making of The Movie, how the SA scene is committed by Viet Cong, and the protagonist can do nothing to change this scene or the portrayal of Viet Nam in the Movie, with the actuality of his supressed memories of the SA of the agent by the Americans, and how the South Vietnamese did nothing (himself included), to give Nguyen credit. I just think that, while not his job to educate people on the horrors, naive readers may miss the critique of South Viet Nam. I completely understand why it was written the way it was, but art can be a dangerous tool and some people, especially those who are not well versed on the genocide, may take away the wrong message.
2) Unless you already knew a lot of these events, it may be difficult to understand the gravitas of some points. For example, if you didn’t know what the Phoenix Program was, or the extent to which American war hawks bombed the country, you may not understand why the North retaliated in the way it did.
3) The big change in the protagonist’s thoughts is that he becomes a bit disenfranchised with communist thought as he sees what happened when revolution was achieved. This could have been handled a bit better, as his disenfranchisement from communism comes from his observation of systematic reeducation. However, his critique of capitalism largely references individual incidents, which frames the conflict as systematic issues vs isolated incidents. It would have more strongly portrayed the protagonist’s conflict if the story also balanced system vs system. I was very surprised that My Lai or any other the other massacres weren’t referenced (there was one reference made in passing). Once again, it is the whole point of the novel that he represses the atrocities he participated in, but I still think that by not fully describing the horrors that Americans (and the compliance of the South Vietnamese army) committed, the story feels a bit uneven.