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A review by pascalthehoff
The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen
4.0
I loved the many shades of tension witnessing a double-agent live between blossoming Vietnamese communist ideals and the temptations of full-on Californian capitalism.
The prose is absolutely stunning – so much so that I couldn't stop marking sentences in my eBook, which I thought worth remembering (but which I'll probably never read again). At times, however, the lavish monologues drift into clutter – exacerbated by the stylistic decision to not use any speech marks for dialogue whatsoever. Never a good idea. Thus, The Sympathizer was sometimes more unwieldy to read than might have been necessary with a few additional editorial touches here and there. It fails to capture the paradoxical simplicity of (for example) Nabokov's stylistically heavy prose.
Just like a person in the story itself told it to the first-person narrator: "Your language betrays you. It is not clear, not succinct, not direct, not simple. It is the language of the elite. You must write for the people!" (p. 242)
The prose is absolutely stunning – so much so that I couldn't stop marking sentences in my eBook, which I thought worth remembering (but which I'll probably never read again). At times, however, the lavish monologues drift into clutter – exacerbated by the stylistic decision to not use any speech marks for dialogue whatsoever. Never a good idea. Thus, The Sympathizer was sometimes more unwieldy to read than might have been necessary with a few additional editorial touches here and there. It fails to capture the paradoxical simplicity of (for example) Nabokov's stylistically heavy prose.
Just like a person in the story itself told it to the first-person narrator: "Your language betrays you. It is not clear, not succinct, not direct, not simple. It is the language of the elite. You must write for the people!" (p. 242)