![]() ![]() He emerges with a sense of this double identity as a source of both pain and power, and goes to the United States in the 1960s for a college education and introduction to all that’s barbarous and bright in American life. The title character of Nguyen’s comparatively hot and sprawling story is a hyper-self-conscious intellectual defined by the divisions he has straddled from birth: the illegitimate son of a French Catholic priest and a teenage Vietnamese villager, he grows up at odds with the world around him. Indeed, this book reads like the absolute opposite of Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, the clipped, cool fragmentary narrative that has long served as the canonical US literary account of that divisive conflict and its ongoing aftermath. ![]() This overreaching mixture leads to occasional missteps that matter little set against the greater result: a bold, artful and globally minded reimagining of the Vietnam war and its interwoven private and public legacies. The Sympathizer can be read as a spy novel, a war novel, an immigrant novel, a novel of ideas, a political novel, a campus novel, a novel about the movies, and a novel, yes, about other novels. Beyond such wilful attuning to Invisible Man, this impressive debut contains a Whitman-like multiplicity. ![]()
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