The Sympathizer

Viet Thanh Nguyen

• 23 mei 2024
• 9781405560863

Samenvatting:

A New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice
Shortlisted for the 2016 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction

The Sympathizer is a Vietnam War novel unlike any other. A gripping spy novel, an astute exploration of extreme politics, and a moving love story, it explores a life between two worlds and examines the legacy of the Vietnam War in literature, film, and the wars we fight today.

An absurdist tour de force that might have been written by a Kafka or Genet' New York Times Book Review

'Extraordinary ... Surely a new classic of war fiction ... I haven't read anything since Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four that illustrates so palpably how a patient tyrant, unmoored from all human constraint, can reduce a man's mind to liquid' Washington Post

'An important new perspective on the Vietnam War . . . The Sympathizer will both startle and grip you' BuzzFeed

'I cannot remember the last time I read a novel whose protagonist I liked so much. Smart, funny, and self-critical, with a keen sense of when to let a story speak for itself ... [Nguyen] proves a gifted and bold satirist' Barnes & Noble Review

*** WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION 2016 ***
WINNER OF THE EDGAR AWARD FOR BEST FIRST NOVEL 2016
WINNER OF THE CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE IN FICTION 2016

'A fierce novel written in a refreshingly high style and charged with intelligent rage' Financial Times

It is April 1975, and Saigon is in chaos. At his villa, a general of the South Vietnamese army is drinking whiskey and, with the help of his trusted captain, drawing up a list of those who will be given passage aboard the last flights out of the country. The general and his compatriots start a new life in Los Angeles, unaware that one among their number, the captain, is secretly observing and reporting on the group to a higher-up in the Viet Cong. The Sympathizer is the story of this captain: a man brought up by an absent French father and a poor Vietnamese mother, a man who went to university in America, but returned to Vietnam to fight for the Communist cause. A gripping spy novel, an astute exploration of extreme politics, and a moving love story, The Sympathizer explores a life between two worlds and examines the legacy of the Vietnam War in literature, film, and the wars we fight today.


'A bold, artful and globally minded reimagining of the Vietnam war . . . The Sympathizer is an excellent literary novel, and one that ends, with unsettling present-day resonance, in a refugee boat where opposing ideas about intentions, actions and their consequences take stark and resilient human form' the Guardian

'Beautifully written and meaty'
Claire Messud

'[A] remarkable debut novel . . . In its final chapters, The Sympathizer becomes an absurdist tour de force that might have been written by a Kafka or Genet'
New York Times

'This debut is a page-turner (read: everybody will finish) that makes you reconsider the Vietnam War ... 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)