As communist forces advance on Saigon, the narrator is forced to draw up a list of individuals who will be evacuated to the U.S. For the past five years, the narrator has been living and working in the villa of a South Vietnamese “General” as his aide-de-camp and intelligence officer, all while acting as an undercover communist agent. The story begins in Saigon in the final month of the Vietnam War. We are taken under his spell and held captive until the novel’s finale. Nguyen’s narrator, who remains nameless for the novel’s entirety, starts by saying, “I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces.” He is a mole, a self-described snoop, a character we know to be well-versed in establishing trust only to take advantage of it later, but in his confession-and that’s really what the narrative is: a confession written in isolation to a man known only as “Commandant”-we become his confidants. This confidence is established in the book’s opening lines. With The Sympathizer, available now from Grove Press, debut author Viet Thanh Nguyen demonstrates his prowess as a writer by creating a narrator who we shouldn’t trust but do anyway.
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