The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen

Published 2015 · 384 pages · 137,475 words · about 9 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction

How hard is The Sympathizer to read?

The Sympathizer scores 48 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.

Vocabulary: 40 out of 100
Accessible prose with some Vietnamese terms and French phrases. The narrator is educated but writes for an audience.
Sentence structure: 42 out of 100
Long, flowing sentences but syntactically clear. The confessional mode creates readable momentum.
Abstraction: 50 out of 100
Concrete spy thriller narrative carries abstract themes about identity, colonialism, and ideology.
Information density: 55 out of 100
Dense with historical and political detail but narratively driven. The spy plot provides structure.
Narrative indirection: 45 out of 100
Mostly direct storytelling with an unreliable narrator. The confession format creates some ironic distance.
Symbolic density: 50 out of 100
The two-faced man, the squid, the nothing - symbolic elements embedded in realistic narrative.
Ironic distance: 75 out of 100
The narrator maintains devastating ironic distance from everyone except himself, where his self-awareness fails him. Nguyen is satirical about American imperialism while serious about the costs of all sides' violence.
Resolution withholding: 65 out of 100
The confession reaches its conclusion; what it accomplishes remains uncertain. Nguyen offers the testimony without promising it will be received as intended.
Structural complexity: 40 out of 100
Straightforward chronological structure framed as a confession. Clear three-part arc.

How The Sympathizer is regarded

The Sympathizer holds a literary regard score of 79 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.

Prizes

Where The Sympathizer sits in Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism

Placed by a full reading of the text (279 passages), not from reputation. Each verdict quotes the passage that earned it. On the axis from myth to irony, The Sympathizer scores 88 out of 100. A second mythos, comedy, pulls at it with a weight of 0.15. About the map of stories.

Mode: Ironic
I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces.
Symbol: Formal
the proper variety, subtlety, and complexity of our universal solvent, fish sauce.
Mythos: Irony vi (visio malefica) (irony vi)
I was guilty of the crime of doing nothing.
Genre: Confession + Anatomy + Novel
I suspect, my dear Commandant, that this confession is not what you are most likely used to reading.

Where the story of The Sympathizer takes place

  • The fall of Saigon and Vietnamese exile in America, 1975-1982 (1975 to 1982), the main setting
  • Fall of Saigon, April 1975
  • Los Angeles exile, 1975-1978 (1975 to 1978)
  • Luzon film set, Philippines, 1976-1977 (1976 to 1977)
  • Thai-Lao border and Mekong ambush, 1978-1979 (1978 to 1979)
  • Reeducation camp and Saigon, 1979-1980 (1979 to 1980)

5 things that are true of The Sympathizer, with the passage for each

  1. The narrator describes his first sexual act at thirteen as being with a gutted squid taken from his mother's kitchen.

    So it was that I committed my first unnatural act at thirteen with a gutted squid purloined from my mother’s kitchen

  2. The narrator writes his own 'scream' on the Auteur's screenplay as AIEYAAHHH!!!

    I wrote onomatopoeically across the cover page of the screenplay in big black letters: AIEYAAHHH!!!

  3. The narrator shoots the journalist Sonny with a silenced Walther P22, firing in the back of his head after he falls.

    Click, clack went the gun, one bullet behind the ear, another in the skull, and Sonny fell face-first with enough graceless weight to break his nose.

  4. The narrator's confession runs to 295 pages when the commandant weighs it.

    all 295 pages written by the light of a wick floating in a cup of oil.

  5. The answer to the commissar's riddle is a reversed form of Ho Chi Minh's slogan.

    while nothing is more precious than independence and freedom, nothing is also more precious than independence and freedom!

Scenes in The Sympathizer that Frye would name

41 sightings of Frye's terms in the text. The strongest:

Anagnorisis, untitled
Didn’t I tell you, Man said, not to return? The narrator recognizes the faceless Commissar as his blood brother Man.
Pathos, untitled
A red heart slowly expanded on her white blouse. Linh and Duc die at the airport, a sacrificial death of innocents.
Confession, untitled
I suspect, my dear Commandant, that this confession is not what you are most likely used to reading. The narrator explicitly frames the book as a confession and discusses its style.
Sparagmos, untitled
There the leg lay, served on a bed of shredded ferns, meat tattered and strips of black cloth still clinging to it A dismembered leg that the narrator must carry is a literal tearing-apart of the body.
Anagnorisis, untitled
I was guilty of the crime of doing nothing. The narrator at last sees what he has forgotten and admits guilt for his inaction.
Anagnorisis, untitled
the answer I screamed again and again and again—nothing!—because I was, at last, enlightened. The pivotal recognition is of 'nothing' as the answer to the Commissar's question.

Books that share these scenes with The Sympathizer

About the author

Viet Thanh Nguyen