![]() ![]() ![]() “Five thousand dollars is wonderful if I thought only of myself, but an Asian - here I paused and allowed a faraway look to come into my eyes, the better to give them time to imagine the vast genealogical banyan tree extending above me, overshadowing me with the oppressive weight of generations come to root on my head - an Asian can not think just about himself.” American perceptions of Asians serve as some of the book’s most deliciously tart commentary, as in a scene where the narrator negotiates the price of a payoff check with an American entertainment lawyer after he is injured in an explosion on the set of a Vietnam War film (winkingly modeled on “Apocalypse Now”) in the Philippines: “The Sympathizer” reads as part literary historical fiction, part espionage thriller and part satire. The unnamed narrator is a mole sent to America with the vanquished South Vietnamese to keep tabs on their actions and potential threat to the communist regime in Vietnam. ![]() Much of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s debut novel, “The Sympathizer” (Grove: 371 pp., $26), takes place in the bland stucco flatlands of Los Angeles between the fall of Saigon in 1975 and the staging and aftermath of a failed counterrevolution by members of the displaced anti-communist Vietnamese diaspora several years later. ![]()
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