What readers think of The Sympathizer, plus links to write your own review.

A professional review published in the Sydney Morning Herald described this Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Viet Thanh Nguyen as "genre-bending." And that is apt. It's historical fiction. It's a spy thriller. It's satire of a highly intellectual kind. It's a war novel. It's philosophical. It's kind of, sort of darkly funny in parts. It's a disturbing tragedy. Oh, and it's highly entertaining even if it's not a particularly easy book to read.

The unnamed narrator, who defines himself as "a man of two minds" who can see both sides of an issue, is a 30-something Vietnamese man who was born in the north of that country and fled to the south with his mother in 1954 when he was nine years old. He is illegitimate and suffers greatly for that. His mother was a young teenager when she was impregnated by a French Roman Catholic priest she served as a maid. The narrator eventually goes to college in Los Angeles and learns to speak English without an accent, which he thinks of as a great accomplishment. He returns to Vietnam during the war. Because of his position in the South Vietnamese army, he is able to flee the country on the last plane out and ends up back in Los Angeles. But here is the narrator's deep secret: All along he has been a Communist spy, a "sympathizer," infiltrating the military of South Vietnam to rise to the rank of captain to report their movements, thoughts, and plans to the North Vietnamese. Our narrator, so trusted and even loved by his South Vietnamese friends and colleagues, is Viet Cong. The book is his supposed written confession to a mysterious "commandant," so right from the beginning we readers realize this mole has been outed—but not in the way you might expect.

The narrator is living a dual life in obvious ways as a Communist mole, but that duality penetrates everything about him. He is of two minds. It's this troubling, difficult-to-maintain dichotomy that truly defines everything he is and does and leads to his eventual downfall.

The greatest strength of this excellent, albeit complex, novel is in its point of view. We experience the Vietnam War's chaotic and brutal end as Saigon fell in April 1975, as well as get a real sense for what it was like to be a Vietnamese refugee in the late 1970s in the United States. Because the writing is so extraordinary, we empathize with these refugees' love of their country—a place from which they may forever be exiled—and how that influences everything they do.

This is the power of truly great literature: It places us inside others' lives. It offers us a perspective outside our own experiences. It gives us empathy. It makes us better human beings.

In the last days as they prepared to evacuate and return home, as personified by Claude, a veteran senior CIA operative in Saigon, the Americans were as cool as can be. Outwardly that is. The atmosphere in the embassy told a different story. There tempers were raw and the scenes were ugly. Among the South Vietnamese officials still in Saigon, matters were even worse. You get all of these just in brief first chapter. Which was all I could get access to as a poor third world academic. Even from this obviously very limited sample, I can say without fear, that this is a really good story, skillfully crafted and told.

The author helps us to see the humanity and inhumanity, which is intrinsic in every person and in every war. He guides us to remember and to know the terrible truths about war and history that we have forgotten or never known. The narrator is painfully introspective; and if we approach the book with an open mind, we become painfully introspective as well. Intense and interesting. A book full of wisdom.

If you hate quotation marks, love depressing books, need more reasons to hate America, like upsetting scenes of torture and killing, then this book is for you.