Review: The Sympathiser

The Sympathiser by Viet Thanh Nguyen
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It tells the story of a Vietnamese spy but it is so much more. It is a gripping thriller. It makes a lot of commits about the identity crisis, the racism that migrants, mixed race people face. He made some cutting observations about both Americans and Vietnamese culture.

“Americans saw unhappiness as a moral failure and thought crime” although nowadays probably also a disease.

“Our country itself was cursed, bastardized, partitioned into north and south, and if it could be said of us that we chose division and death in our uncivil war, that was also only partially true. We had not chosen to be debased by the French, to be divided by them into an unholy trinity of north, center, and south, and to be turned over to the great powers of capitalism and communism for a further bisection, then given roles as the clashing armies of a Cold War chess match played in air-conditioned rooms by white men wearing suits and lies.”

I finished feeling i had a greater understanding of the tragedy of Vietnamese history but also the general struggle of being a peasant in a world where the powerful controlled lives covertly like through capitalism or overtly like war and autocracy.



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