Politician’s Funeral Pyre
Viet Nguyen’s debut novel The Sympathizer is reviewed by Cecilia Quirk of the Melbourne Review of Books. The Vietnam War, it will be no news to anyone, has had considerable impact on world history, both as a national tragedy for Vietnam and in its global cultural impacts. It sparked a mass movement of people around […]
The Saturday Paper Reviews The Sympathizer
CG praises Viet Thanh Nguyen’s debut novel, The Sympathizer, in their review for The Saturday Paper. “The best kind of truth,” observes the narrator of The Sympathizer, “[is] the one that meant at least two things.” The illicit son of a young Vietnamese woman and a European priest, he is also a communist mole working for […]
Sydney Morning Herald’s Pick of the Week: The Sympathizer
Cameron Woodhead of the Sydney Morning Herald reviews The Sympathizer. Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer is a brilliant tragicomedy on the Vietnam War and its aftermath. The unnamed protagonist is a captain with the South Vietnamese army who is secretly spying for the Communists as the fall of Saigon begins. The son of a Vietnamese teenage girl […]
Spying with Sympathy and Love
Pat C. Hoy II reviews Viet Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer for The Sewanee Review literary magazine. This review appeared in volume 123, Fall 2015. I have a confession of my own to make about Viet Thanh Nguyen’s intriguing confessional, The Sympathizer. Tour de force that the novel is, its convoluted but compelling plot and my own animated […]
The Globe and Mail Reviews The Sympathizer
Jade Colbert reviews Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer along with other debut novels for The Globe and Mail. The adage goes, “History is written by the victors,” but America controls the story of the Vietnam War. (No wonder, then, the widespread ignorance marking the recent controversy around Calgary band Viet Cong.) In Viet Thanh Nguyen’s […]
Nancy Pearl’s Not Kidding: This Is A Must-Read
Nancy Pearl and Marcie Sillman discuss The Sympathizer on KUOW’s The Record. Listen to the podcast here or read the transcript below. Special, important, brilliant: That’s the rave review from Nancy Pearl for this week’s reading pick, and she doesn’t use those words lightly. The book is “The Sympathizer,” by Viet Thanh Nguyen, an associate […]
Viet Thanh Nguyen’s ‘The Sympathizer’: Compelling, Original Take on Vietnam War
Dan DeLuca of the Philadelphia Inquirer reviews The Sympathizer. From Michael Herr’s Dispatches to Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke, from Oliver Stone’s Platoon to Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.,” the American experience in Vietnam has been closely examined and obsessed over, its human cost and toll on the national psyche put under the microscope […]
Historical Novel Society Reviews The Sympathizer
Viet Thanh Nguyen’s debut novel, The Sympathizer, is reviewed by Viviane Crystal of the Historical Novel Society. 1968: Saigon falls to the enemy, and thousands of Vietnamese and Americans flock to escape as the military forces of Ho Chi Minh enter South Vietnam. Those fleeing are truly mourning but are fiercely proud of their country. […]
The Stranger’s Voice
Karl Ashoka Britto reviews The Sympathizer for Public Books. The Sympathizer, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s riveting debut novel, is a chronicle of war wrapped in a spy thriller and tucked inside a confession. It is also a political satire, a send-up of Hollywood, and a scathing critique of mid-20th-century Orientalism. Nguyen juggles genres like so many flying […]
Book Review: “The Sympathizer” — The Vietnam War, Split in Two
Harvey Blume reviews The Sympathizer for The Arts Fuse. In this powerful novel about divisions, ideological and psychological, Vietnamese-American writer Viet Thanh Nguyen shakes up stereotypical notions of the War in Vietnam. This is the first novel by Vietnamese-American writer Viet Thanh Nguyen, and whatever few defects can be discerned in the plot are more than […]
The Rumpus Reviews The Sympathizer
Amina Gautier reviews Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer for The Rumpus. Replete with ambushes, betrayals, double agents, espionage, freedom fighters, refugees, and taboo sex, Viet Nguyen’s debut novel The Sympathizer has what readers have been trained to expect from war narratives and spy thrillers. However, despite all that is to be expected, The Sympathizer […]
Briefly Noted: The Sympathizer
The Sympathizer is reviewed in The New Yorker‘s ‘Briefly Noted’ section. This comic picaresque set in nineteen-seventies California is narrated by a Vietcong mole who has allowed himself to be groomed by the C.I.A.—to the point where the Vietnamese Communists no longer recognize this Beatles-loving person as one of their own. The novel’s best parts […]
‘The Sympathizer’ Is A Masterful Debut
Sarah Bagby from KMUW, Wichita’s NPR Station, reviews The Sympathizer. Listen to the review here or read the transcript below. The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen is set in motion by the fall of Saigon in 1975. April marks a mass exodus of Vietnamese loyalists, primarily to the U.S. Our narrator works for a powerful […]
Moral Quandaries in Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer
Bob Douglas of Critics At Large reviews Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel, The Sympathizer. “This fantasy of Americans as rescuers has re-emerged in Rory Kennedy’s documentary Last Days in Vietnam … telling a story that is good for the American soul. The movie depicts how, in the final hours of American involvement in Vietnam, a handful […]
The Masters Review: The Sympathizer
The Masters Review‘s Alisha Gorder reviews Viet Thanh Nguyen’s debut novel, The Sympathizer. With The Sympathizer, available now from Grove Press, debut author Viet Thanh Nguyen demonstrates his prowess as a writer by creating a narrator who we shouldn’t trust but do anyway. This confidence is established in the book’s opening lines. Nguyen’s narrator, who […]
