On Saturday, somewhere across the middle of Canada at 38,000 feet up I victoriously finished Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Sympathizer.” I was on the plane returning from the Senior Tennis Nationals in Ottawa, which was competitive but good fun too. (See the clay courts at left.) I had spent a couple of weeks studying “The Sympathizer” and underlining its key passages. I’m sure one could write his or her dissertation on this novel about the Vietnam War and its aftermath. It’s that type of “important” book, one told from a Vietnamese perspective — on the other side of the war — that’s rarely ever heard.
Over the years I’ve read my share of Vietnam War and refugee stories and seen the American Vietnam War movies, but I haven’t experienced anything like this book, which holds all sides accountable. It’s unsparingly angry and satirical, especially towards the U.S. involvement in the war and American culture. In an interview at the back of the paperback, the author says he wanted “readers to be rattled by the book” and provoked to “rethink their assumptions about this history, and also about the literature they’ve encountered before.” Well no doubt he succeeded: I was rattled anew.
The novel is a bit unusual in that the entire story is told as a confession. The narrator is detailing what has transpired in his life and his thoughts to someone called the Commandant. You don’t really figure out everything about this and the Commandant until the book’s end. But needless to say, it’s a bit ominous. You wonder: what’s all this confession about?!
The Vietnamese narrator is a bit different too, he sees himself as a revolutionary who’s working at the end of the war for a South Vietnamese general, but he is secretly feeding information to the communists. He seems both humane and inhumane. On the one hand he’s utterly loyal and protective of the blood brothers he grew up with and fighting for the people, on the other, his actions to cover up his spying results in the deaths of innocent civilians.
The narrator’s story, you come to find out, is quite a journey. He barely escapes the fall of Saigon in 1975, only to join the General as a refugee in Los Angeles. There he continues to spy for the communists, passing along info on the General’s plan to mount a secret invasion via Thailand to get Vietnam back. Eventually this lands the narrator on a dangerous reconnaissance mission in Laos that results in scary repercussions.
Oh my! You won’t escape the war’s suffering in this book, or how it pulled people apart. It’s a story that lambastes U.S. imperialism, but it doesn’t absolve the communists or South Vietnamese either. There’s one section of the book that’s particularly satirical in which the narrator gets hired as a consultant on a Vietnam War movie called “The Hamlet” being filmed in the Philippines. On set, there’s an egomaniacal director and no speaking lines for the Vietnamese, represented in the film by Korean and Filipino actors. Need I say more? What follows is a dark spoof of what in reality is a takeoff of “Apocalypse Now.” Whoosh, it’s a must read.
In the end, I thought “The Sympathizer” was not exactly an easy book — it was dense in its delivery as one’s person confession without much in the way of dialogue or paragraph breaks. Its unbreaking text often stretched the length of a page. It was also confrontational (in a good way), upending assumptions about the war as it went along. But it was also a novel that had a lot of good lines in it and important things to say about ideology, identity, and the history of the war. By the end, my copy was completely marked up and underlined. I found “The Sympathizer” one of those rare, “big” books that comes out only once in every blue moon.
As an encore to that, I listened to the audiobook of Paul Kalanithi’s popular nonfiction book “When Breath Becomes Air,” which had finally come off hold at the library. Many know this is about a 36-year-old doctor’s battle with lung cancer, which he is diagnosed with during the last year of his residency to become a neurosurgeon.
Oh this is a sad book, but it’s told rather beautifully and matter-of-factly. From the story within, Paul seemed a very bright and outstanding person. After a decade worth of training, he was finally on the verge of becoming the doctor he had always wanted to be — only to receive such a horrendous diagnosis. How he finished his last year of residency while undergoing treatment — and managed to write this book too — is nothing short of miraculous. I found his battle with cancer and his efforts to help others very courageous.
Somehow I had mistakenly thought this book would be mostly about the choice he and his wife made to have a baby after he received his diagnosis. And though it touches on their decision and the baby, the book focuses mainly on Paul’s battle as well as his medical career. He details what made him want to become a doctor, his medical practice and his medical cases to quite an extent. (If you’re really squeamish about hospital stuff, just a slight warning.)
Although Paul didn’t get the chance to finish writing his book, his wife’s very well-done epilogue really brought his story together for me and also made me lose it. How very sad it is, but his story and battle are also strangely comforting and inspirational, too. I think others would benefit in reading or listening to Paul’s book. I’m sure I will think of him & his fight for a very long time.
Now I could use something happy and light next. What about you — have you read either of these books, and if so what did you think?
