THE SYMPATHIZER by Viet Thanh Nguyen

This is a huge book, not just in its 500 paperback pages, but huge in its scope. It is a book to be greatly admired, and not surprisingly it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2016. It is epic to read, and I found I couldn't read it at the end of the day as it would send me to sleep, but as a challenging day time read, it was excellent. I have read on GoodReads a review of this from a Vietnamese-American who was a refugee after the Vietnam war and he reckons it is the most authentic Vietnam to America experience he has read. I would say that is high praise. 

This novel is a history lesson in Western involvement in this region of Asia from the days of French imperialism - the book's lead character, the Captain, is the product of a French priest and a poor uneducated Vietnamese woman - to the disaster that was America leading the charge in the Vietnam War. It is also a story of being the chameleon that anyone of mixed race finds themselves in - neither one or the other, and yet able to move effortlessly between the two. So it is for the Captain - highly intelligent, astute, intuitive, he is a huge asset to both the Vietnamese and the Americans. He is educated in the US, graduating from Berkeley, immersing himself into the typical life of a young man in 1970s US. A good time. So here he is in the kingdom of capitalism, but at heart he is a committed Communist. It is not a great surprise, due to his unique  talents and makeup that he becomes a spy. 

The story opens in 1975 as the US is in a race against time to leave Saigon, everything gone horribly wrong, the Communists almost at the door, everyone wanting to get one of those final spaces on an American plane. The Captain is in the employ of a general, quite high up in the pecking order; he has the task of drawing up the lists of who goes on the planes. Including himself of course. It's certainly gripping reading, the evacuation of Saigon, depicted so brilliantly in movies like The Killing Fields. 

The telling of the migrant experience in America is riveting too. From being a general to being just a migrant working a low paying dead end bottom of the pond job cannot be an easy adjustment. Their lives may be saved, but their souls have a long way to go before feeling fulfilled and happy. Meantime the Captain continues to report back to his own hierarchy about what is going on. There are betrayals, heart break, tragedy. The Captain is intensely loyal to his non-communist school boy friend, and it is he who leads him back to Vietnam as part of a revolutionary unit to overthrow the communist regime. How you do this with out betraying yourself, and pretending to be what you are not, I just do not know but mind altering substances certainly seem to help.

This is not a book for the faint hearted, parts I did have to gloss over, it is graphic in its violence. But when your life is all about keeping yourself alive, then violence has to feature. What is so extraordinary about this novel is how much we learn about Vietnam, its history, its culture, the appalling treatment over the decades dished out by the French and the Americans to a beautiful country, a cultured and refined people, the constant fluidity that a mixed race person has to go through on a daily basis, conflicted in many many ways, how life really is for migrants from non-Western countries to Western countries. It is good, very good, but also very long, an experience to read, not one for the beach or holiday resort. But if you want to expand your brain and challenge your Western mind set, this is well worth it.