I was in close quarters with some representative specimens of the most dangerous creature in the history of the world, the white man in a suit. Sympathizer is one of the many books I’ve read for class this year and it’s taken me months to review it because it's just. so. good.This book’s unnamed narrator is a spy for North Vietnam in the South who ends up going to America on the last plane out. So yes, Sympathizer is a spy story, but not anywhere close to a tone you’ve read before: th

Another Update (2nd update)--- I've been reading through my Kindle book again the last few days of this book --looking over my notes -taking new ones.--Our local book club is meeting to talk about "The Sympathizer". 25 of members from around the Bay Area are attending....with 25 others on the waitlist. For people who live in our area -- this is an important topic. Americans and Vietnamese/Americans live closely together here. The Vietnamese culture thrives in our city. Right after I read this bo...

I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces. Perhaps not surprisingly, I am also a man of two minds. With these words Viet Thanh Nguyen decides to start the novel and these two sentences were enough to get me hooked. They managed to intrigue me, to want to know more and set the basis for what will prove to be one of the main theme, the interior conflict of the narrator. The Symphatizer is a book about the Vietnam War and its aftermath. The book is about loyalty, identity and the difficul

The winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.Usually, when I write my thoughts about a story, I look for a good quote as a lead in. Sometimes, it's hard to find such a quote, whereas in other cases, I find myself having a luxury of choosing from as many as a dozen good quotes that I loved while reading the novel.But with Sympathizer, it's just plain crazy. When I reached the last page of the novel, I looked back at the highlighted lines I saved, and I found myself with over EIGHTY different...

Being an English major from UCBerkeley and an Artistic Director of Asian American Theater Company for 3 years, I've run across a lot of Asian American works. Though my heart is always with these stories, they've often lacked style. Viet Nguyen has style. He's really funny, in a smart unpredictable way. And I think he's is going to get a lot of awards and all that when word really gets out. Deservedly so because it touches all the big points of Vietnamese American history while never getting bogg...

Pulitzer Prize winner and I don't always agree, and such is the case here. A very worthy book, a book with so many truisms, such as this one "booted hard by the irony of how revolution fought for independence and freedom could make those things worth less than nothing." The tone is ironic, often satirical but it gets to be too much, wearing on me as I was reading. Almost became a chore to shift through some of this to get to the parts that meant something to me. I little remember the Vietnam War...

This is without a doubt an important story to tell. " ....thousands of refugees wailed as if attending a funeral, the burial of their nation, dead too soon, as so many were, at a tender twenty- one years of age." The writing is as good as I found in The Refugees but I wasn't immediately drawn in and had a difficult time trying to understand what was happening during the evacuation, but I'm guessing that it reflects the reality of what it must have been like. Our narrator, the Captain , a double

So clever and witty but also gripping.

Forty years ago this month, after a long, deadly release of flatulence from American politicians, the United States evacuated its personnel from Saigon in an operation appropriately code-named Frequent Wind. Whether you were alive then or not, the images of those panicked Vietnamese crushing the U.S. Embassy are tattooed on our collective consciousness.In the opening ­pages of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s extraordinary first novel, “The Sympathizer,” that terror feels so real that you’ll mistake your bea...

If you ever struggle with your feelings and understanding about America’s role in the Vietnam War, this book could give you a useful framework to both widespread blaming and forms of forgiveness to both sides. There really was no right side to be on, and the Vietnamese people became a pawns in a larger struggle: Our country itself was cursed, bastardized, partitioned into north and south, and if it could be said of us that we chose division and death in our uncivil war, that was also only partia...

I loved The Refugees. I loved the writing and I loved Viet Thanh Nguyen's perspective on the experiences of Vietnamese refugees in the United States. So I was excited to read The Sympathizer, Thanh Nguyen's Pulitzer Prize winning novel. Unfortunately, I didn't love it in the way I loved The Refugees. I'm conflicted as to why:-One of Thanh Nguyen's strengths is his incredible writing -- at times playful, often cutting elegantly to the heart of the matter and always strong and intelligent. For tha...

I appreciated the themes of The Sympathizer though the delivery of the themes did not resonate with me. I like how Viet Thanh Nguyen portrays war from the Vietnamese perspective and counteracts the American-centric worldview of most novels and narratives of war. As a Vietnamese American who grew up in the United States myself, I feel like I had been brainwashed into believing the mainstream American perspective of the war, ignoring the United States’ complicity in imperialism and related wrongs

I see the value that this book contributes to American literature. I read New York Times review just a few minutes ago (didn't want anything to interfere with my understanding of the book), and for most part I'd like to agree.Few years I go when I was still in college, I took this class in art history and the famous Vietnam Veteran Memorial came up. Let's not talk about the architecture's significance, but my young mind at that time was just full of surprise: "What about the South Vietnamese? Wh...