Protagonist, Antagonist, Sympathizer, Spy
Megan Galbraith of Consequence Magazine reviews The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen. I’m not going to lie; The Sympathizer is a challenging read. It is also a necessary, haunting, and astonishing first novel. Viet Thanh Nguyen’s book forces readers to examine the role the U.S. played in Vietnam and the far-reaching consequences of American action on Vietnamese […]
Bookforum Reviews The Sympathizer
Lisa Locascio of Bookforum reviews Viet Thanh Nguyen’s debut novel The Sympathizer. From the grand ’Nam narratives of ’70s cinema to the works of creative-writing-syllabus mainstays like Tim O’Brien and Robert Olen Butler, representations of Vietnam and the war we staged there are some of our most indelible and critically renowned cultural products. The subgenre’s […]
8Books Review of The Sympathizer
Lily Wong of 8asians reviews The Sympathizer. Viet Thanh Nguyen’s expertly and cunningly crafted debut novel The Sympathizer dictates a confession in the years after the end of the Vietnam War. At it’s very base, this is a spy’s story. Told from his perspective to an unnamed Commandant (and equally so to the reader), the narrative […]
Two Sides of the Vietnam War and its Personal Costs
Arnold R. Isaacs reviews Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer alongside Michael Putzel’s The Price They Paid for Cicero Magazine. Wars end, but for those who live through them, they are not over. That’s the common thread in these two otherwise completely dissimilar books, one fictional and one not, both looking back at the Vietnam War and […]
Dallas News Fiction Review: ‘The Sympathizer’ by Viet Thanh Nguyen
May-Lee Chai of Dallas News reviews Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer. Viet Thanh Nguyen’s accomplished and confident first novel explores the conflicted world of a Communist spy embedded first in Saigon before the fall of the American-backed government and then in Los Angeles within the South Vietnamese community in exile. Tasked with reporting on […]
Spy vs. History
The New Inquiry‘s Grayson Clary reviews The Sympathizer. “Indochina” is a poor toponym, violent in its imprecision, but Indochina is the specialized name for a particular Franco-American nightmare. Open up the dome of any United States general and you’d find a fearful diorama permanently installed there, displaying black pajamas and napalm alongside a program called […]
Book Reporter Reviews The Sympathizer
Miriam Tuliao reviews The Sympathizer for Book Reporter. “I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces. Perhaps, not surprisingly, I am also a man of two minds,” confesses Captain, the incognito narrator in this riveting debut novel that opens with the imminent capture of Saigon in April 1975. While serving […]
A North Vietnamese Spy Finds More Than He Bargained For
Viet Thanh Nguyen’s debut novel The Sympathizer is reviewed by Nicholas Mancusi of The Daily Beast. A war novel, written any time after our re-evaluation of the phenomenon that began around the end of the American Civil War, will by its nature include certain unifying elements plucked from the grab-bag of heady themes—the blinding effects […]
A Crime of Dispassion: ‘The Sympathizer’
Henri Lipton of ZYZZYVA literary journal reviews The Sympathizer. In schools throughout the country, American children and teenagers tend to learn about the Vietman War—and by extension, the country of Vietnam—through the prism of U.S. culture. This is not merely to reaffirm that entrenched ideas and predilections form our understanding of historical events, but also […]
Barnes and Noble Calls Sympathizer “Spectacular”
David Burr Gerrard reviews The Sympathizer on Barnes and Noble Review. From time to time, there will be a surge of public arguments over whether the protagonists of novels must be “sympathetic.” This term was on my mind as I read Viet Thanh Nguyen’s spectacular debut novel The Sympathizer, and not merely because of the title. The […]
‘The Sympathizer:’ A Double Life in Vietnam and in America
The Seattle Times‘ David Takami reviews The Sympathizer. Protagonists in the novels of Saul Bellow, like Albert Corde in “The Dean’s December,” are known for struggling with the “big-scale insanities of the 20th century.” The same might be said about the main character in Viet Thanh Nguyen’s canny, audacious debut novel, “The Sympathizer” (Grove Press, […]
