I was late getting around to it, but I just finished reading The Sympathizer, the 2016 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Viet Thanh Nguyen about a conflicted Vietnamese communist double agent struggling with his identity while living in the U.S. after the fall of Saigon.
This post isn’t a review of the novel, which I found compelling. It’s simply an opportunity for me to point out excellent passages of writing, and as a writer myself, I bow down to the greatness.
A moment after surviving a brush with death, the narrator:
“As that last glimmer faded, it occurred to me that the light at the end of the tunnel seen by people who have died and come back to life was not Heaven. Wasn’t it much more plausible that what they saw was not what lay ahead of them but what lay behind? This was the universal memory of the first tunnel we all pass through, the light at its end penetrating our fetal darkness, disturbing our closed eyelids, beckoning us toward the chute that will deliver us to our inevitable appointment with death.”
I’ve heard about the alleged light at the end of the tunnel, but I’ve never come across it portrayed in this way. Bravo!
At one point, the narrator returns to Saigon and muses on what he’ll miss about America:
“. . . perhaps most of all, that omnipresent American narcotic, optimism, the unending flow of which poured through the American mind continuously, whitewashing the graffiti of despair, rage, hatred, and nihilism scrawled there nightly by the black hoodlums of the unconscious.”
Just wow!
How about a simple, textbook example of deploying one of the writer’s tools—comparisons (simile, metaphor)—to make writing come alive and leave a lasting, vivid impression using only a few words:
“. . . the scout’s eyes were a ruin, dark and shadowed as the windows of an abandoned palace.”
Then there was this aside about authors. A part of me wants to object, but I have no standing:
“No author was immune from having his own ideas and words quoted back to him favorably. Authors were, at heart, no matter how much they blustered or how suavely they carried themselves, insecure creatures with sensitive egos, as delicate in the constitution as movie stars, only much poorer and less glamorous.”
It’s not only the stellar writing that makes The Sympathizer worth reading; it also possesses what all readers look for in novels: a good story, well told.
There’s also a Max series based on the novel, which I can’t comment on since I’ve seen none of it, and Nguyen wrote a sequel, The Committed, which isn’t currently on my reading list.
