Why did Zeese love this book?
Like many of my generation of Americans I demonstrated against the Vietnam War which I saw unfolding at a distance through the newspapers and the television screen.
Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel has a remarkable sense of being inside the skin of his title character, a young Vietnamese sympathizer of the North Vietnamese as they attempt to free the South. This is a book of great complexity.
Through the eyes of the protagonist, a double agent working for the South Vietnamese, we see the fall of Saigon, the escape of those who have connections on the final flights out and, in the United States, the escaped officers and former South Vietnamese movers-and-shakers who now own hole-in-the-wall restaurants in San Jose and work in menial jobs while plotting the overthrow of the communist regime.
But we also see the revolution hardening, the re-education camps, the human sympathy drained out of the victors.…
5 authors picked The Sympathizer as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION 2016
It is April 1975, and Saigon is in chaos. At his villa, a general of the South Vietnamese army is drinking whiskey and, with the help of his trusted captain, drawing up a list of those who will be given passage aboard the last flights out of the country. The general and his compatriots start a new life in Los Angeles, unaware that one among their number, the captain, is secretly observing and reporting on the group to a higher-up in the Viet Cong. The Sympathizer is the story of this captain:…