Nguyen is also king of the descriptive list it’s a distinct style that he uses to great advantage. The plot is tight, the descriptions brutal and the prose laugh out loud funny at times the slick noir humour is biting. He recounts his dramatic tale of escaping from Saigon and living in the US afterwards amid the Vietnamese diaspora as they seek to eek out existences for themselves as homesick refugees. Yet the narrator was actually a Communist, sent to work as a revolutionary mole on the side of the South and then to the United States. Sometime brutally harsh with descriptions of torture, at other times with sardonic humor, The Sympathizer is a well-written philosophical look at racism, brutality in both war and “peace”, and survival.The book takes the form of the protagonist, the son of a Vietnamese woman and French priest, writing his confession to his Communist bosses in the days after the war. Nguyen deftly portrays our protagonist’s two minds - sympathetic to both the southern vietnamese culture and to the communist cause of an American mindset and longing for his homeland of friend, lover, and confidant in the shadow of betrayal. Having spent his university years in the Unites States, he is able to more easily navigate the cultural differences than his fellow refugees, though racism is pervasive throughout - from his own countrymen as he, himself is mixed race, and from Americans’ distrust of the ‘yellow’ infiltration of the “Boat People”. As an attache to a high ranking Vietnamese General, he has access to top secret information, American intelligence, and a ticket to the United States after the fall of Saigon. He’s half-French, half-Vietnamese, an Army Captain in the Vietnamese Army, while spying for the Communists. The Sympathizer’s narrator is a double agent - a man of “two minds”.
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