Overview
Now an HBO Limited Series from Executive Producers Park Chan-wook and Robert Downey Jr., Streaming Exclusively on Max Winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction Winner of the 2016 Edgar Award for Best First Novel Winner of the 2016 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction One of the New York Times 's 100 Best Books of the 21st Century One of TIME 's 100 Best Mystery and Thriller Books of All Time "[A] remarkable debut novel."--Philip Caputo, New York Times Book Review (cover review) Winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize, a startling debut novel from a powerful new voice featuring one of the most remarkable narrators of recent fiction: a conflicted subversive and idealist working as a double agent in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. The winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, as well as seven other awards, The Sympathizer is the breakthrough novel of the year. With the pace and suspense of a thriller and prose that has been compared to Graham Greene and Saul Bellow, The Sympathizer is a sweeping epic of love and betrayal. The narrator, a communist double agent, is a "man of two minds," a half-French, half-Vietnamese army captain who arranges to come to America after the Fall of Saigon, and while building a new life with other Vietnamese refugees in Los Angeles is secretly reporting back to his communist superiors in Vietnam. The Sympathizer is a blistering exploration of identity and America, a gripping espionage novel, and a powerful story of love and friendship.
Professional Reviews
Praise for The Sympathizer : A National Bestseller A New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice An Amazon Best Book of the Year So Far (#5) One of Newsday ''s
"10 Books Not to Miss in April" A Publishers Weekly Debut Fiction Pick A Library Journal Best Debut of Spring One of Kirkus Reviews'
"10 Novels to Lose Yourself In" and a Must-Read Pick for Spring A Flavorwire Must-Read Book for April Shortlisted for the 2015 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize
"[A] remarkable debut novel . . . [Nguyen] brings a distinctive perspective to the war and its aftermath. His book fills a void in the literature, giving voice to the previously voiceless . . . The nameless protagonist-narrator, a memorable character despite his anonymity, is an Americanized Vietnamese with a divided heart and mind. Nguyen's skill in portraying this sort of ambivalent personality compares favorably with masters like Conrad, Greene, and le Carré. . . . Both thriller and social satire. . . . In its final chapters, The Sympathizer becomes an absurdist tour de force that might have been written by a Kafka or Genet."
-- Philip Caputo, New York Times Book Review (cover review)
"[A] dark and exciting debut novel . . . The Sympathizer starts with the fall of Saigon in 1975, depicting the corrupt jockeying for places on the departing planes. It's a frenzied, abrasive, attention-grabbing overture . . . Excoriating ironies abound. . . . Black humor seeps through these pages."
-- Wall Street Journal
"A dark, funny--and Vietnamese--look at the Vietnam War . . . The novel is rife with insight and criticism--and importantly . . . the perspective of a Vietnamese person during and after the war."
-- All Things Considered , NPR
"Extraordinary . . . Surely a new classic of war fiction. . . . [Nguyen] has wrapped a cerebral thriller around a desperate expat story that confronts the existential dilemmas of our age. . . . Laced with insight on the ways nonwhite people are rendered invisible in the propaganda that passes for our pop culture. . . . I haven't read anything since Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four that illustrates so palpably how a patient tyrant, unmoored from all humane constraint, can reduce a man's mind to liquid."
-- Washington Post
"The great achievement of The Sympathizer is that it gives the Vietnamese a voice and demands that we pay attention. Until now, it's been largely a one-sided conversation--or at least that's how it seems in American popular culture . . . We've never had a story quite like this one before. . . . [Nguyen] has a great deal to say and a knowing, playful, deeply intelligent voice . . . There are so many passages to admire. Mr. Nguyen is a master of the telling ironic phrase and the biting detail, and the book pulses with Catch-22-style absurdities."
-- New York Times
"This debut is a page-turner (read: everybody will finish) that makes you reconsider the Vietnam War (read: everyone will have an opinion) . . . Nguyen's darkly comic novel offers a point of view about American culture that we've rarely seen."
-- Oprah.com (Oprah's Book Club Suggestions)
"The novel's best parts are painful, hilarious exposures of white tone-deafness . . . [the] satire is delicious."
-- New Yorker
" The Sympathizer reads as part literary historical fiction, part espionage thriller and part satire. American perceptions of Asians serve as some of the book's most deliciously tart commentary . . . Nguyen knows of what he writes."
-- Los Angeles Times
"Sparkling and audacious . . . Unique and startling . . . Nguyen's prose is often like a feverish, frenzied dream, a profuse and lively stream of images sparking off the page. . . . Nguyen can be wickedly funny. . . . [His] narrator has an incisive take on Asian-American history and what it means to be a nonwhite American. . . . this remarkable, rollicking read by a Vietnamese immigrant heralds an exciting new voice in American literature."
-- Seattle Times
"Stunned, amazed, impressed. [ The Sympathizer is] so skillfully and brilliantly executed that I cannot believe this is a first novel. (I should add jealous to my emotions.) Upends our notions of the Vietnam novel."
-- Chicago Tribune
"A very special, important, brilliant novel . . . Amazing . . . I don't say brilliant about a lot of books, but this is a brilliant book . . . A fabulous book . . . that everyone should read."
-- Nancy Pearl, KUOW.org
"Powerful and evocative . . . Gripping."
-- San Francisco Chronicle
"Welcome a unique new voice to the literary chorus. . . . [ The Sympathizer ] is, among other things, a character-driven thriller, a political satire, and a biting historical account of colonization and revolution. It dazzles on all fronts."
-- Cleveland Plain Dealer
"For those who have been waiting for the great Vietnamese American Vietnam War novel, this is it. More to the point: This is a great American Vietnam War novel. . . . It is the last word (I hope) on the horrors of the Vietnamese re-education camps that our allies were sentenced to when we left them swinging in the wind."
-- Vietnam Veterans of America
"Magisterial. A disturbing, fascinating and darkly comic take on the fall of Saigon and its aftermath, and a powerful examination of guilt and betrayal. The Sympathizer is destined to become a classic and redefine the way we think about the Vietnam War and what it means to win and to lose."-- T.C. Boyle
"Trapped in endless civil war, ''the man who has two minds' tortures and is tortured as he tries to meld the halves of his country and of himself. Viet Thanh Nguyen accomplishes this integration in a magnificent feat of storytelling. The Sympathizer is a novel of literary, historical, and political importance."-- Maxine Hong Kingston, author of The Fifth Book of Peace
"It is a strong, strange and liberating joy to read this book, feeling with each page that a broken world is being knitted back together, once again whole and complete. As far as I am concerned, Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Sympathizer --both a great American novel and a great Vietnamese novel--will close the shelf on the literature of the Vietnam War."-- Bob Shacochis, author of The Woman Who Lost Her Soul
"Read this novel with care; it is easy to read, wry, ironic, wise, and captivating, but it could change not only your outlook on the Vietnam War, but your outlook on what you believe about politics and ideology in general. It does what the best of literature does, expands your consciousness beyond the limitations of your body and individual circumstances."-- Karl Marlantes, author of Matterhorn and What It Is Like to Go to War
"Not only does Viet Thanh Nguyen bring a rare and authentic voice to the body of American literature generated by the Vietnam War, he has created a book that transcends history and politics and nationality and speaks to the enduring theme of literature: the universal quest for self, for identity. The Sympathizer is a stellar debut by a writer of depth and skill."-- Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain
" The Sympathizer is a remarkable and brilliant book. By turns harrowing, and cut through by shards of unexpected and telling humor, this novel gives us the conflict in Vietnam, and its aftermath, in a way that is deeply truthful, and vitally important."-- Vincent Lam, author of Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures and The Headmaster's Wager
"I think I''d have to go all the way back to Nabokov's Humbert Humbert to find the last narrative voice that so completely conked me over the head and took me prisoner. Nguyen and his unnamed protagonist certainly have made a name for themselves with one of the smartest, darkest, funniest books you''ll read this year."-- David Abrams, author of Fobbit
"Audaciously and vividly imagined. A compelling read."-- Andrew X. Pham, author of Catfish and Mandala
"Nguyen's cross-grained protagonist exposes the hidden costs in both countries of America's tragic Asian misadventure. Nguyen's probing literary art illuminates how Americans failed in their political and military attempt to remake Vietnam--but then succeeded spectacularly in shrouding their failure in Hollywood distortions. Compelling--and profoundly unsettling."
-- Booklist (starred review)
"A closely written novel of after-the-war Vietnam, when all that was solid melted into air. As Graham Greene and Robert Stone have taught us, on the streets of Saigon, nothing is as it seems. . . . Think Alan Furst meets Elmore Leonard, and you'll capture Nguyen at his most surreal . . . Both chilling and funny, and a worthy addition to the library of first-rate novels about the Vietnam War."-- Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"[An] astonishing first novel . . . Nguyen's novel enlivens debate about history and human nature, and his narrator has a poignant often mindful voice."-- Publishers Weekly (starred, box
