I read Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Sympathizer as one of the first longer works of the Random Number Lit project. This book was not selected by a random number generator, or at least not in the traditional sense. I began this project a few months ago but I was not chronicling it then. I have a Word Document that I have kept a running log of my responses, reactions, reveries about these texts that I have selected sort of through the process, sort of not, and thought I should do something with this writing more than stash it on my computer for my daughter to find ages from now.
Here is that undertaking, but you will have to forgive me of some of the ways I honor this project but also someway that I will diverge from it from time to time. I made mention of the works that I have read before the start of this project in the previous post, so I wont rehash that here, but in my preparation for, in the waiting for the delivery of certain works to come in the mail or through I-Share, I still have to have something to be reading and so I read Viet Thanh Nguyen's 2016 Pulitzer winner, The Sympathizer. I chose this book because I have been reading through the Pulitzer list with my friend Drew Moody for over a decade now, and I have at current count 3 more books to read now that I have finished this one. They are all the most recent winners, Less, The Overstory, and The Nickel Boys. When we started in 2009, our agreement was that we couldn't read any of the newer works, the ones awarded as the project went along, until we had read all of the older ones first, pre-2009 works. At some point a great deal of those works piled up on me, and so I have them left to finish. I feel I am done with that project but if you see either of these three works enter this list, that is because I am in some sort of lag period between selecting a book and coming into possession of it. So, now on with the show:
There is something deeply strange about Nguyen's novel that doesn't sit right the entire time I read the first couple hundred pages of this book. There are moments when the diction feels off in someway. There is a way that the story works, or at least worked on me, that I didn't realize the twist until near the end. This is still a very contemporary work, and so I won't ruin the twist here, but it is majestic to see it unfold. The book led me by the nose the entire way, and at times I did not want to miss a word of it. There is a strangely sort of spoken word quality with some of the writing, that will be intermixed with some deeply reverie-laden insights that work magically well together. At times the prose can feel disjointed in a way that might make you think there was some issue with the editing of the book. To leave somewhat sort of awkward phrases in the text or more to the point a joke that - to my ears and I don't want to be critical of the work because I am deeply enamored with it - don't quite land seemed to me an odd choice at times.
There is a sort of dream-like quality to the text like the moment with the movie-set cemetary where the main character mourns is dead mother. This event leads to his almost being murdered is a strange set of occasions that seem unreal to me as I read them and less real as the twist is revealed in the end. That is the nature of this text. Even the choice of the main character is so strange for an American novel, and probably the only novel that has won the Pulitzer that was told from the perspective of a person on the opposing side of the United States, a North Vietnamese Sympathizer. It is just such an odd choice that makes you question every moment of the text as you read it, the line between what is true and what is not, what is made up and what may be a harmless exaggeration, you follow the nameless narrator through a constantly churning set of details that constantly have you ask, who is on what side, and ultimately why does any of this matter in the end.
This book speaks for itself better than perhaps I could help speak for it. This book is challenging. I have not thought long about the occasion of the Vietnam War. Not many Pulitzer's talk about that troubled time which seems odd although obvious as well. It is a crucial moment in the history of America and Nguyen seems so aptly the person to tell this tale but tell it with majesterial power and force. So many of the choices of this book are deeply baffling to me as I read and as I reflect on it now that make it seem very nearly a perfect work. The last few pages of this book, Chapter 21, 22 and 23 are so utterly baffling, befuddling, troubling, deeply troubling, and indicting in a way that will shift you as a person if you give yourself over to this story. I am not sure I have ever encountered a work with this sort of force - with exception of possibly Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad whose first 80 pages will have an impact on you in a similar way to the last couple of chapters of this book.
My simple recommendation is that you read this book. Give it time, you don't have to rush this one though it will grab you in a way, it will take hold in a way that you cannot be released from. One part of this project that I want to focus on deeply is the connection between the reader and the work. The feeling of being enmeshed with the work, the way some works of fiction or poetry can live on in us, the way that we can surrender ourselves to the work of true beauty in a way that shifts us, challenges us, and we can reconceive of ourselves in the light of their beauty, difficulty, challenge, truth, or forcefulness.
I don't want to patronize this work by comparing it to a child, but it is like you have been half-hearing a complaint from a child or a spouse or a co-worker, lets say, and something jolts you into acknowledging them and you hear the whole story that you thought you understood but now hearing the whole thing, you are alarmed, first, but then deeply ashamed, second, but the fact that the complaint has come to you at all means there might still be time. I hope that there might still be time. Don't do nothing.
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