Summary and Reviews of The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen

Media Reviews

The New York Times Book Review Both thriller and social satire. . . . In its final chapters, The Sympathizer becomes an absurdist tour de force that might have been written by a Kafka or Genet.

The Washington Post I haven’t read anything since Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four that illustrates so palpably how a patient tyrant, unmoored from all humane constraint, can reduce a man’s mind to liquid. . . . Nguyen plumbs the loneliness of human life, the costs of fraternity and the tragic limits of our sympathy.

Than Nien Daily Nguyen’s voice is sharp and acerbic and unforgiving and ungrateful. He’s funny and bright and he goes farther than any author in pursuing his spy’s one professed talent—one that war made undesirable for generations—trying to understand things from both sides.

Kirkus Reviews Starred Review. Both chilling and funny, and a worthy addition to the library of first-rate novels about the Vietnam War.

Library Journal Starred Review. Ultimately a meditation on war, political movements, America's imperialist role, the CIA, torture, loyalty, and one's personal identity, this is a powerful, thought-provoking work. It's hard to believe this effort, one of the best recent novels to cover the Vietnamese conflict from an Asian perspective, is a debut.

Publishers Weekly Starred Review. Nguyen's novel enlivens debate about history and human nature, and his narrator has a poignant, often mirthful voice.

 David Abrams, author of Fobbit I think I'd have to go all the way back to Nabokov's Humbert Humbert to find the last narrative voice that so completely conked me over the head and took me prisoner.

 Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain Not only does Viet Thanh Nguyen bring a rare and authentic voice to the body of American literature generated by the Vietnam War, he has created a book that transcends history and politics and nationality and speaks to the enduring theme of literature: the universal quest for self, for identity.

 T.C. Boyle Magisterial. A disturbing, fascinating and darkly comic take on the fall of Saigon and its aftermath, and a powerful examination of guilt and betrayal.

 Vincent Lam, author of Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures and The Headmaster's Wager By turns harrowing, and cut through by shards of unexpected and telling humor, this novel gives us the conflict in Vietnam, and its aftermath, in a way that is deeply truthful, and vitally important.

Reader Reviews

Cathryn Conroy
Read This Extraordinary Book for a Whole New Perspective of the Aftermath of the Vietnam War
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 ...   Read More John Otim
On the eve of departure
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 ...   Read More Pat
Thoughtful, Painful, Truthful
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 ...   Read More Roberta
Grim
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.

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