Viet Thanh Nguyen "The Sympathizer"
Viet Thanh Nguyen, a Vietnamese-American novel "The Sympathizer", won the Pulitzer Prize in 2016 and became the most discussed book in America, bringing the theme of the Vietnam War back to the public debate space after a long break and a fundamentally new interpretation. However, for the reader, to whom the Vietnamese war for the most part seems to be infinitely alien and far away, this circumstance will hardly serve as sufficient motivation to read. Therefore, perhaps, in our realities, it would be more appropriate to speak and think about Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel in the context of an eternal intellectual curse — the habit of looking at things from several sides at once, and the consequences that such a view entails.
The unnamed protagonist of "The Sympathizer" is a Vietnamese intellectual and double agent. During the day, he is not for fear, but for conscience, he serves in the secret police of the pro-American South Vietnamese Republic, but at night, he passes the secret information to his named brother and the connected Viet Cong Manu. The hero’s misfortune is that being a half-breed, or, as his fellow citizens say, a bastard (his father is a Catholic priest who seduced a 13-year-old servant girl), he already does not quite understand who he really is and whom he serves. He seems to believe in the ideals of communism, but at the same time, he cannot but sympathize with the people whom he betrays. He is too complicated to take on one side with a clear conscience, and by this, he is strikingly different from his two sister cities: the true Communist Man and the staunch anti-communist Bon. His soul thus becomes the scene of a tragedy in the Hegelian understanding of this term - where there is no lie that opposes the truth, but one truth fights with the other.
The war is heading for sunset, the remnants of the defeated South Vietnamese army are hastily evacuated to America, and the hero is sent with them. According to the plan of his communist curators, he should follow the revanchist underground and report on the mood among the Vietnamese emigrants, but in practice, everything turns out to be much more difficult - and worse.
The road of double betrayal and complex emotional rush first pushes the hero to a crime, and then, as a kind of redemption, he and Bon find themselves in a detachment of saboteurs who are trying to penetrate Vietnamese territory in the hope of staging a coup d'état. In addition, the only relatively light (and at the same time Homerichesially ridiculous) interlude on this dark path becomes the participation of the hero in the filming of a film about the Vietnam War, which obviously parodies "Full Metal Jacket" Stanley Kubrick.
The Viet Thanh Nguyen novel is built in such a way that, starting with unconditional sympathy to the hero, the reader gradually begins to penetrate to him with persistent distrust and even disgust, while finding the seams, where one is replaced by another, fails either from the first reading or even from the second. However, in the final dramatic scenes, clearly referring to the famous story of Franz Kafka "In the Penal Colony", disgust is again replaced by sympathy, but at some other, almost transcendental level. Compassion for the concrete — the imperfect and the weak — is replaced by compassion to literally everything, forcing us, in strict accordance with the ancient tradition, to experience catharsis in the final deafening power.
In general, the word "sympathy" is not accidentally rendered in the title - it, undoubtedly, serves as the semantic key to the whole novel. We are accustomed to perceive this word (and along with the emotion behind it) purely positively, but Thanh Nguyen shows us, if I may say so, the dark side of sympathy. The ability to empathize, the ability to feel the pain of others as his own becomes for his hero not a way to improve the world, but an excuse, at best, of his own inaction, and at worst - outright atrocities. Subtle perception of the world is not good, but misfortune and misfortune. Failure to choose a party is the worst of betrayals. In addition, this unexpected perspective, outlandish reversal of the well-known topic makes "The Sympathizer" an important event not only of American, but also of world culture.