My review of The Sympathizer, the 2016 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction #MondayBlogs #PulitzerPrize #PulitzerPrizeChallenge #AmReading #BookReview

Today, the 2016 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, The Sympathizer, takes center stage in my Pulitzer Prize Challenge. I purchased this novel after our trip to Vietnam, and I devoured it. The Guardian reviewer claimed: “The Sympathizer reminded me of how big books can be.” I wholeheartedly agree.

I remember the first training exercise (after basic and AIT) in which I participated. It was confusing as all get out. It was nearly impossible to figure out who was friend and foe. I grew up on stories of World War II in which the different sides were painted in such a way that it seemed obvious who was who. And if all else fails, you can judge a person based on their language. German? Bad guy. French? Good guy (for the most part). But what about a civil war? How do you tell good guy from bad buy then?

The Sympathizer explores this issue in depth. The starting lines tell the reader:

I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces. Perhaps not surprisingly, I am also a man of two minds.

From that point on, we follow the narrator through the war in Vietnam and to the shores of California; always wondering on which side he will fall. We learn a valuable lesson through our reading. Good and bad are not black and white, but rather shades of grey. The good guys can do very bad things, and the bad guys can do good things.

As a child of the Vietnam war era (my godfather is a Vietnam vet) and a student of history, I thought I understood the Vietnam war. But there are so many angles to this conflict that American students miss in our high school history classes. Those angles were forced, loud and clear, into our faces when we visited the war museum in Saigon, where the war is termed “The American War of Aggression”. Viet Thanh Nguyen introduces the nuances to the war in a language we can understand without being confrontational.

The Sympathizer is superbly written. The kind of book that forces a reader to stop and re-read a paragraph just to enjoy the language. It is also a surprisingly easy read for a 500-page literary novel. While I’ve grown tired of the use of first person, it not only works here but is essential to understand the nuances of the identity crisis a Vietnamese army captain undergoes.

Like all great novels, The Sympathizer has it all: love, friendship, and espionage as well as historical lessons from which we could learn. I highly recommend this novel!

Update: My copy of Less, the 2018 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction arrived Saturday (two weeks early!), and I’ve already dove in. I’m not promising I’ll have a review for you next week, but I’ll at least have some observations.