I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces. Perhaps not surprisingly, I am also a man of two minds,” the unnamed narrator of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s 2015 debut confesses. Addressed to the Commandant, this powerful, immersive, and funny novel of dualities follows a Communist sympathizer. Born to a Vietnamese mother impregnated in her teens by a French priest and college-educated in the United States, he becomes a North Vietnamese mole who easily sees other perspectives and gains the trust of those with different interests, and readers follow him in a story of what led to his political imprisonment; in due course, we learn of his time as an adviser in the making of a movie about the Vietnam War (the Vietnamese, Nguyen writes, know it as the American War). The Sympathizer is also a metafictive work about the production of American fantasies by way of Hollywood and other depictions that strip people of color of their complexity and agency. It’s marked by Nguyen’s fierce intelligence and refusal to be bound by others’ representations and interpretations, a career-long tendency that the best writers have. If this richly allusive book is not already a classic, it will be.
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