One plotline has the unnamed narrator serving as a movie consultant for an Apocalypse Now-style Vietnam war epic.

Nguyen said the book is meant to be a critique with “something to offend everyone” and is, he hopes, a work that brings him closer to his ideal of writing criticism as fiction and fiction as criticism. Its opening sentence – “I am a spy, a sleeper, a man of two faces – is a homage to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Though the novel can simply be read as fiction, those who know where to look will see that it is deeply informed by the literary history and theory that Nguyen has studied. “They operate in such different worlds and languages and assumptions.” Seen by both sides as an interloper or a dilettante, he spent 20 years trying to bring together his academic scholarship and literary ambitions. He says he found it lonely to try to be both a scholar and a novelist. “I wrote as if I had all the privilege of a majority writer, and majority writers never have to translate or pander,” Nguyen said.īy day, Nguyen is a professor of American and ethnic studies at the University of Southern California. His narrator never rejects communism, for example. Had The Sympathizer been written for a white audience, the “ending would be radically different”. He refused to translate his culture – for example, writing “Vietnamese New Year” instead of “Tet” – or have the book’s themes affirm American ideals and American exceptionalism. Nguyen was adamant from the beginning that his novel would not fall into the “typical maneuvers of minority literature written for a majority audience”.

Nguyen viet thanh the sympathizer