It is one thing to receive universal critical acclaim and commercial success with your debut novel, and quite another thing entirely to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for it; this extraordinary experience graced University of Southern California professor Viet Thanh Nguyen. The novel in question? The Sympathizer, a black comedy that is also a spy novel, political fiction and documentary of the uniqueness of the Vietnamese immigrant experience. It tells the story of a protagonist with no name who is also the novel's narrator; he is part-French and part-Vietnamese, and is a mole in the South Vietnamese army, acquiring secrets on behalf of the socialist army of North Vietnam. The man is tailor-made for a life of duality; his heritage is also a confusing duality, his mother providing his Vietnamese, eastern mysticism based ancestry, whilst his father is a Frenchman who is also a Catholic priest. Even as an immigrant he keeps up the pretense of sympathizing with the South, and remains within their tight-knit community whilst living in exile in California, where he works in the film industry as a cultural adviser to a movie director making a violent and bloody biopic about the American experience during the Vietnam War. After his show business odyssey he returns to Vietnam as part of a guerrilla force who carry out raids against the Communists. If his life is confusing, the book is not; the book's themes of double lives, multiple identities and the American appropriation of Vietnam's war against itself are easily discernible and also thought provoking.
The plot is not a neat, chronologically-ordered retelling of events; instead, the story is told in fits and starts as part of a confession given by the narrator when he is a political prisoner. It is an autobiography that is dragged from the narrator, and in some places, the information that he shares is coerced by his interrogators, which raises some questions about its voracity in the first place; is he speaking the truth, or is he simply re-telling a story that he feels his captors want to hear from him? Even the same parts of the story that are re-told over and over are slightly re-shaped each time, indicating that the same events can be seen completely differently depending upon the lens through which one is looking whilst the story is being told.
The opening scene of the book is the fall of Saigon, when the Viet Cong, also known as the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam, captured the city on April 30th, 1975, effectively ending the devastating Vietnam War. It also laid the foundation for Vietnam's reunification into one Socialist Republic. Poetically the novel was published on the fortieth anniversary of the fall.
Critics praised the novel for its Vietnam-centric viewpoint on the Vietnam War, often rather different to the more familiar Americanized literature that we are more accustomed to. In particular, it is more nuanced and grounded in the political and cerebral, rather than being another "shoot 'em up" re-hash of the horrors of the war on the ground.
As well as receiving the Pulitzer Prize in 2016, the novel was given many other plaudits, including the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and the PEN/Faulkner Award. However, Nguyen remains better known as a writer of short stories, many of which having been published in The Chicago Tribune. He published a book of short stories as the much-anticipated follow-up to The Sympathizer; The Refugees was published in February 2017, and was both critically and commercially well-received. In 2016 he also penned a non-fiction account of his country's experiences; Nothing Ever Dies : Vietnam and the Memory of War was a finalist in the National Book Awards for Non-Fiction.
