Man In The Middle
Whatever
little the world knows about the Vietnam War, it is from the point of view of
the Americans. They first interfered in another country’s affairs, and
unleashed horrific violence, including chemical warfare (the infamous napalm)
on the Vietnamese people; then, when they got whipped, American movies
portrayed the Vietnamese as savages.
Which is why
Viet Thanh Nguyen’s debut novel The
Sympathizer is such an important and powerful piece of work, for which he deservedly
won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction this year.
The unnamed
protagonist of the novel is a spy, a communist mole, who by his proximity to
the General, the chief of South Vietnam’s the secret police, is privy to many
secrets. Nguyen is very critical of his country’s elite, who paid their way out
of the country when the communists won the war. The very complex and very
gripping story is in the form of a confession to another authority figure, a
Commandant.
The man,
called Captain by his boss, is quite literally living a double life—he is a
half-breed illegitimate son of a teenage Vietnamese mother and a French
Catholic priest;; he was educated in the US, where is suffered the usual racosm
but learnt to speak English without an accent. Still, he returned to his
country to live perilously. As he writes in the book’s opening chapter, “I am a
spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces. Perhaps not surprisingly, I am
also a man of two minds. I am not some misunderstood mutant from a comic book
or a horror movie, although some have treated me as such. I am simply able to
see any issue from both sides. Sometimes I flatter myself that this is a
talent, and although it is admittedly one of a minor nature, it is perhaps also
the sole talent I possess. At other times, when I reflect on how I cannot help
but observe the world in such a fashion, I wonder if what I have should even be
called talent. After all, a talent is something you use, not something that
uses you. The talent you cannot not use, the talent that possesses
you—that is a hazard, I must confess.”
Captain has
two close friends, or blood brothers, one of whom, Bon is a CIA assassin and
the other, Man, is his handler. This sets the plot for guilt, betrayal and much
emotional turbulence. Captain participates in the murder of a man he refers to
as the crapulent major, and is so riven by guilt that he keeps giving money to
the man’s wife.
He remains a
spy even in America, from where he keeps sending coded messages to Man in
invisible ink. The General and his cohorts, unhappy with their squalid lives in
the US, plan a counterrevolutionary invasion, and the narrator lands bang in
the middle of the doomed-to-failure plan.
The tone of
the novel moves from tragic (the fall of Saigon and the death of Bon’s family),
to dark to absurdist. It’s written in a twisty-turny style with several
digressions for commenting on cultural quirks of both the Vietnamese and the
Americans. It is also very unpredictable… and unputdownable.
The
Sympathizer
By
Viet Thanh Nguyen
Publisher:
Grove Press
Pages: 371
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