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Book Review: A tale of sympathy
Written like a confession, the book stole my heart from the first page. It is the story of a communist spy pretending to be a nationalist captain, a man whom shares a blood pledge with one communist and one nationalist and is the product of an Oriental mother and Occidental father, fighting for a communist Vietnam.
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The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen, the winner of 2016 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. (Shutterstock/-)
I
have to admit that I hadn’t heard of “The Sympathizer” until it won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize. The work of fiction by Viet Thanh Nguyen tells the eye-opening tale of a man who is caught between worlds.
Written like a confession, the book stole my heart from the first page. It is the story of a communist spy pretending to be a nationalist captain, a man whom shares a blood pledge with one communist and one nationalist and is the product of an Oriental mother and Occidental father, fighting for a communist Vietnam.
The story revolves around the life of an unnamed military captain, secretly a communist, who spies on a general. He, the general, and his friend are forced to escape Vietnam following the liberation of Saigon. Alongside other refugees, he lives in a camp before he starts a new life in America and resumes his role as a spy to monitor the nationalist movement in exile.
He attempts to represent the war truthfully but, failing to do so, returns to Vietnam as a part of a nationalist fighter group. On the journey, he is caught and is forced to confess.
As the title suggests, "The Sympathizer" encourages readers to sympathize with the many aspects of society, most notably with refugees.
The narrator, a refugee himself, explained that those countries flooded by refugees are not the only ones with troubles.
“We were displaced persons, but it was time more than space that defined us. … for displaced people, the first question was always about time: When can I return?”
The writer insists that the book has ‘something to offend everyone’. It offers a commentary about the white-dominated world.
The narrator, while working for a movie production about the Vietnam War, quickly noted that Vietnamese characters were not given any dialog while, a decision to cast Filipino actors in Vietnamese character roles represents an observation on the Hollywood tendency to generalize, despite extreme diversities.
All in all, "The Sympathizer" is an opportunity to laugh while being slapped in the face. It is an honest confession; there are two sides to everything. “We don’t succeed or fail because of fortune or luck. We succeed because we understand the way the world works and what we have to do. We fail because others understand this better than we do”.
Sympathy is often underrated in today’s society. When suffering dominates everyday news, we turn off our feelings. Viet Thanh Nguyen shows us the importance of sympathy. Through sympathy that we can understand and through this understanding we can survive.
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