Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Sympathizer

THE REVIEW

In my small way, I have often written about literature but rarely, if ever, about something that can genuinely be defined as a "literary phenomenon." Viet Thanh Nguyen, blogger, writer, and socio-political commentator (Repubblica published one of his articles just this week) is one of the emerging authors of the new American literature. Born in 1971, he was born in Vietnam but in 1975, his family moved to the United States as refugees, and 1975 is exactly the year in which the events of "The Sympathizer," his first novel, begin. Published in 2015, it won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize as "the best book of the year."

If often the term "literary phenomenon" is used for something that sparks scandal or outrage for its contents (thus as a "media phenomenon"), let's say that here the definition should be understood in the classic sense: many have wished to define the novel as one of the definitive works on the Vietnam War. The author himself criticized the entertainment world for how they've depicted the war, claiming in this way his direct experience as a Vietnamese forced to leave his country as a four-year-old child, to grow up and live for the rest of his life in the USA. Perhaps for this reason, we can consider the protagonist of the novel as a sort of his alter ego, but the truth is that perhaps the main character of this novel embodies all possible contradictions of what was, after all, like all wars, something hallucinatory that empties the very meaning of life, alienating entire societies and the individual, until even allegiance and which side you're really on can, despite everything, become something relative and completely foreign to yourself.

The fact that I, having just finished reading the novel, narrated in the first person by the protagonist, don't even remember his name (perhaps he doesn't have one) only reinforces the universal content of this work: it's April 1975, the Vietcong break through the northern front and enter Saigon. Americans flee en masse, among them is our (anti)hero who is a captain of the national police of South Vietnam. Half Western and half Vietnamese, the son of an illicit relationship between his mother (Vietnamese) and a French Catholic priest, he studied in the United States and is highly regarded for his extensive knowledge of both American culture and that of his country of origin, but aside from all this, he is also a sleeper agent, a spy trained by the communists whom we follow in his work of gathering information as an infiltrator in the Vietnamese community in the United States and in what appears to be a split personality. If you have read that masterful work known as "Mother Night" by Vonnegut, you can probably understand what I'm talking about: the protagonist is a captain in the service of a general planning a military return to Vietnam, but he works as a spy for the Vietcong. So who is he really, what is he really doing, what is right and what is wrong? But above all, what is the meaning of all of this, and what drives him to seemingly easily and naturally divide himself between Western civilization and the United States of America and the values of the place where he was born and raised?

Whether compromise is possible or necessary is not explained. The point is the deep inner split of an individual who, in his very nature (as a "métis," as the French say), is divided in half and, as such, is opposed by everyone and in search of his own identity, and is only instrumentally appreciated during the war, from both sides, without ever gaining in this play of roles what should have been his primary aim, which is freedom.

As such, the novel does not side with any of the parties involved, just as, in the end, neither does the protagonist, who, over time, can only come to realize his condition, becoming aware of his individuality and independence of thought, but only when all the games have been played and all cards are on the table.