The Sympathizer

The unnamed narrator is a mole for the Communist North in the South Vietnamese military. Unlike a lot of spy novels, the tension in this book is all about the narrator trying to be two different moral people, not a spy who tries not to be discovered. As a mole, he does terrible things to people on both sides of the conflict. He is also the son of a French man and Vietnamese woman, which brings its own tension. After they evacuate and become refugees in the U.S., he has to negotiate between being Vietnamese and American expectations and views. All of these pull him in brilliantly written fashion in multiple directions. It's rare that I get this engaged with a book where the tension is primarily internal, but it pulled me in so much I missed a Muni stop even. There's a few scenes of action, but the tough stuff is in our protagonist's inner monologue.

@sanae@bookwyrm.social has a much meatier review of The Sympathizer than mine; go read their review for a deeper discussion of the book's ethics.

4 stars: loved this book, would recommend

I read this in like two days, first book in a while I've had trouble putting down. It had the constant tension I associate with a spy novel, but was a lot more introspective. I found it to be a pretty quick read for its length and for its literary-novel-ness, though the lack of quotation marks tripped me up a few times.

I saw some review describe it as "cynical" but I thought it was actually fairly optimistic, given the subject matter. I think it accurately describes the state of the world and am surprised that anything in there would be surprising in the year 2024, but there is a theme of a strange kind of hope in it. Every character is deeply flawed, but not absolved of the responsibility to do the right thing. The spy as protagonist, the "sympathizer", also lets you look at and understand the motivations of all the different sides in this war, not just as ideologies but also as people, and even when the motivations are actually deeply unsympathetic, most of the characters do seem very human (my one criticism is that this is a lot more true of the men than of the women). I also saw a review describe it as "funny" and that is probably not the first adjective I'd use, like it's not wrong but it is not the type of book you read if you want something funny.

It touched on a lot of subjects that I now consider kind of cliché in immigrant stories, but which were done so well that I did not feel that at all. Like the whole "stuck between two worlds" thing felt a bit more fresh, maybe because it did not buy into the model minority myth at all or discuss it at all. I guess making the protagonist a communist helps there, no pressure to be a doctor or lawyer. Some other reviews on other websites said it dragged in the middle part, but that was my favourite part. It was also a rare example of a mixed race Asian protagonist, and while some things did not quite ring true to my experience (though my background is otherwise quite different), its tendency to lean on stereotypes there didn't bother me too much and overall I thought it was much better written than such things usually are.

I haven't read a lot of spy novels and usually think of like, James Bond. I like that the protagonist is not a particularly tough guy and that he struggles with every aspect of being a spy in the ways that I think a real person would. In particular I liked the theme of the careful managing and splitting of identities. An obvious theme in a spy novel but I think one that also rings true to anyone who finds themselves, as the cliche goes, between worlds in some ways.

It is pretty graphic, though it only felt gratuitous in a few places - one particular scene I kind of rolled my eyes at.

Content warnings: some fairly graphic sexual assault, torture, murder, implied child sexual abuse. Racism (aimed towards the protagonist), misogyny (largely from the protagonist). Uh. bestiality?