![]() ![]() When we first meet the Captain he is being held by the Communist victors well after the fall of Saigon and is being forced to write his confession. Through his confession we learn about the war, the complexities of his interpersonal relationships–both romantic and otherwise–and the very meaningful differences between American and Vietnamese culture and perspective. Everything is told through the Captain’s experiences and wry observations. And do not worry, I am not giving anything away. The first line of the book is “I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces.” The Captain is a complex man, the product of a Vietnamese mother and a French priest. So when he says he is a man of two faces, he means it both literally and figuratively and portions of the book speak to the prejudice he experiences from being biracial and without a traditional father. Nguyen’s lead character and narrator is a Captain in South Vietnam but he is also a spy for, and sympathizes with, the Communists. ![]() ![]() It seems as though there have been a lot of first novels lately maybe there always have been and I have just been oblivious. Viet Thanh Nguyen’s “The Sympathizer”, winner of the 2015 Andrew Carnegie Award for Excellence in Fiction, is a good one, so long as you do not mind vivid descriptions of deception, murder and torture! ![]()
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