Book Review: A Satirical and Political Indictment of the Vietnam War
Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer
Reviewed by Gautam Bhatia
At one point in Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The
Sympathizer, the narrator, recalling the fall of Saigon, falls to
reflecting upon the American-christened name of the evacuation operation,
Frequent Wind: “I had brooded on it for a year, wondering if I could sue the US
government for malpractice, or at least a criminal failure of the literary
imagination. Who was the military mastermind who squeezed out Frequent Wind
from between his tightly clenched buttocks?” Coming as it does, soon after an
almost physically painful description of battlefield casualties during the
evacuation – “the fuel tanks… incinerated the three dozen occupants, their
teeth exposed in a permanent, simian rictus; the flesh of their lips and faces
burned off; the skin a finely charred obsidian, smooth and alien, all the hair
converted to ash, no longer recognisable as my countrymen or as human beings” –
the flippancy feels strained, almost jarring. And yet, that is the point.
Catastrophe is made bearable only by an ability to pick out the tiny
absurdities amidst widespread carnage. It is an attitude that marks both
Nguyen’s unnamed protagonist, and the novel as a whole.
The Sympathizer is the story of a North Vietnamese
communist double-agent, who has successfully infiltrated the inner circle of a South
Vietnamese general at the peak of the war. Beginning with the fall of Saigon, The
Sympathizer follows its narrator’s flight and exile to the US, where
he continues to remain the general’s confidante, while secretly communicating
the state of the South Vietnamese diaspora to the communists back home. It
follows his bumbling attempts to craft his own identity in an unfamiliar land,
as he deals with love, loss and the heartbreak of exile – “So it was that
we soaped ourselves in sadness and we rinsed ourselves with hope…” – and the
increasingly ghastly moral compromises that he makes to maintain his role as a
double-agent and his final return to Vietnam as part of a doomed expeditionary
force that he joins to save the life of his ‘blood brother’, a fiercely
partisan South Vietnamese army-man.
At one level, The
Sympathizer is a thrilling spy story, a novel about friendship, exile
and personal compromise, and a study of moral and mental degradation under the
crushing weight of a totalitarian regime. But it is also an unmistakably
satirical and political indictment of a savage war that began in hubris and
ended in tragedy. Nguyen understands that the sheer magnitude of the
destruction cannot be effectively captured through bleak realism, but rather,
through a style that disavows its own seriousness, that often pushes us to
laughter, before making us remember the darkness that lies underneath. At one
point, for instance, he writes:
“Aided (or was it
invaded?) by Superman, our fecund little country no longer produced significant
amounts of rice, rubber, and tin, cultivating instead an annual bumper crop of
prostitutes, girls who had never so much as danced to a rock song before the
pimps we called cowboys slapped pasties on their quivering country breasts and
prodded them onto the catwalk of a Tu Do bar. Now am I daring to accuse
American strategic planners of deliberately eradicating peasant villages in
order to smoke out the girls who would have had little choice but to sexually
service the same boys who had bombed, shelled, strafed, torched, pillaged, or
merely forcibly evacuated said villages? I am merely noting that the creation
of native prostitutes to service foreign privates is an inevitable outcome of a
war of occupation, one of those nasty little side effects of defending freedom
that all the wives, sisters, girlfriends, mothers, pastors, and politicians in
Smallville, USA, pretend to ignore behind waxed and buffed walls of teeth as
they welcome their soldiers home, ready to treat any unmentionable afflictions
with the penicillin of American goodness.”
The almost oppressive
lightness of the style effectively conceals the horror of the reality that it
describes, but even in the concealment, creates a more lasting sense of
disquiet than the urgency of direct description... read more:
