December Review: 'The Sympathiser'

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Book: The Sympathiser, by Viet Thanh Nguyen

Publication date: 2015

WCRG meeting: 13 December 2017

Rating: 7.5


Thank you to all who either attended in person, or submitted their reviews in advance of our meeting on 13 December 2017. We met to discuss this novel about the struggles of the divided mind to find a way of believing in something when the answer that he seems to find is ‘nothing’. As usual the group was divided too but not passionately. Most of us had found something worthwhile in the mixture of philosophy, humour and history and we had the patience to learn something about a country that only one of us had seen at first hand.

The discussion began by considering the way in which the first person narrator whom we know as the Captain described himself from the beginning as being divided, in two minds. He begins and ends with this division and the whole novel shows all sorts of divisions. We spoke about the problems of the expatriate as the narrator is one of the Vietnamese who leaves Saigon when the Americans abandon the country to its fate. He spends some of the narrative describing the ways in which he both wishes to be Vietnamese and yet finds himself needing to live in a foreign country which is alien to him. Doctors and lawyers are janitors and work in supermarkets.

The theme of homelessness and displacement plays out in many ways, and we noted the way in which sexuality is introduced but is not allowed to develop into satisfying love. He himself is illegitimate and blamed for this. In spite of the conclusion that it all comes to ‘Nothing’ this book was satisfying in a way to most of us. We noticed the alienation of the writer being a communist not long after the McCarthy era in the United States and the way in which history, in the form of his film is written so that he and his fellow /sympathizers’ are written out. He is not named, but nor is anyone else. All have nick-names given to them such as the ‘Crapulent Major’ but have no names of their own apart from Madame Mori.

One of our group asked us to consider how we would describe the kind of fiction that the book represents and we found that an illuminating question as it was difficult to answer. Is it history? Well not really and yet it makes us think about the way in which the west fights wars that it thinks are in its interest and then walks away leaving ‘nothing’ We were shown of course that there is a bleak wasteland of the places where the forest and the natural habitats of the land were flattened and destroyed. Yet it is not sentimental in any way. He even points out that they didn’t need the Americans to spoil the country, they were perfectly capable of doing that for themselves. Still, crammed into a boat his final thought is ‘We will live’. The revolution has still to be found but they will go on seeking it. We enjoyed the humour and the philosophy: ‘life is a suicide mission’ as well.

Overall score given was 7.5.