The Sympathizer
Viet Thanh Nguyen · 2015
A communist double agent flees Saigon in 1975 and lands in Los Angeles, where he spies on his fellow exiles while losing himself between identities. Nguyen wrote the great Vietnamese American novel: bitter, hilarious, intellectually relentless. It won the 2016 Pulitzer and demolished the idea that the Vietnam War belongs to American storytellers alone.
The case against
Every paragraph performs the same trick: a doubled identity, a barbed aphorism, an irony folded back on itself. Funny for a hundred pages, fatiguing for four hundred. The movie-set satire runs long, the women exist mostly to be desired or violated, and the reeducation finale grinds toward its epiphany at lecture pace.
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