The narrator of "The Sympathizer," by Viet Thanh Nguyen is the son of a Vietnamese woman and a French priest. Sent as a young man to Occidental College in Los Angeles, he is also an expert in American Studies and speaks flawless English. After returning to Vietnam, he becomes a captain in the army serving as aide de camp to a General. Secretly he is a spy for the communist revolution. As he tells his story, from narrowly escaping Saigon with the General in 1975 to life as a refugee in Los Angeles to working as a consultant to "The Auteur" on a film about Vietnam shot in the Philippines and finally to Thailand, we discover he is actually writing his "confession" to a commandant in a prison camp back in Vietnam.
The captain's otherness allows him to see Vietnam and America with a clarity that enlightens us as readers. While much of his story is devoted to how badly Americans understood the Vietnamese people, he also skewers partisans on both sides of the divide within his home country. His encounters with military, political and academic experts of all sorts reveal the ideological blinders that shaped their beliefs and horrific violence of the war. In the end, though, the story is about his struggle to come to terms with his own participation in that violence. What he did and did not do weigh heavily on his conscience.
Though his story is a serious one, Nguyen writes with a comic touch that belies the tragedy all around. "The Sympathizer" deserves comparisons with "Catch 22" as a classic dark comedy about war.
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