"The Outsider" by Albert Camus (1949)

 

Without beating around the bush, Camus sets the tone of his novella with the line, "Mother died today". The Outsider, or The Stranger, introduces Meursault, an Algerian-born French whose mother died in a home, and how he continued with his humdrum daily life as nothing of any significance had happened recently, leading him eventually to commit an unplanned act of violence. 

The prose is straightforward, painfully descriptive, and somewhat prosaic. Personally, I found it hard to relate to the protagonist. Even though he exhibits a rational and realistic approach to viewing the world, he lacks imagination, creativity, and aspirations for the future. It comes as no surprise since Meursault is the outcome of viewing the world as inherently meaningless and with no purpose, which is basically what the book is trying to communicate. 

The Outsider is praised as one of the most influential books of the 20th century.  I can imagine why since it was released in a time when talking about the absurdity of life was unheard of and even taboo. 

"Of Mice and Men" by John Steinbeck (1937)

This caught me by surprise! I'd never expected a classic to be such a dizzyingly gripping experience. All I ever knew of this book was a reference from Lost. 

The novella centers around two companions, George and Lennie. Antithetical to each other, George is the bright one while Lennie, as big as he is, has the brain of a child. The pair of nomads go from one trouble to the next, searching for a place to lie low and work. The problem is that Lennie always gets them into trouble.

The story is linear and straightforward, but tension lurks in every interaction. Steinbeck has an excellent command of how to draw readers' attention, making their brains go wild imagining the worst happening to the characters.

One of my best scenes was when Carlson had to put down Candy's senile dog and Candy's comment later, "I oughtta shot that dog myself, George. I shouldn't oughtta of let no strangers shoot my dog". And how it mirrors George's reaction at the end. That was simply brilliant foreshadowing!

Of Mice and Men tackles many themes like companionship, but to my surprise, the book screams  'loneliness'. Every single character is so terrified of being left all alone: 

• Curely's wife who keeps popping out of nowhere looking for her "husband"
• Candy who refuses to let go of his ancient dog 
• Crooks who's sick and tired of having the four walls of his room and the books as his company and who also envies Lennie because he has George
• Lennie whose biggest fear is George ditching him

The non-diverting nature of the themes makes the book a great choice for book clubs. It's simple, easily detected, and realistically and objectively presented 'as it is' without a solution. Yes, it's dramatic but unforgettable. 
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Summary:

Of Mice and Men is a short read, meant to be consumed in one setting. At its heart, it's about friendship/loyalty/feeling sympathetic, but it's also a comment on freedom, poverty, and basic human rights.

"Sputnik Sweetheart" by Haruki Murakami (1999)

 

"I spread my fingers apart and stare at the palms of both hands, looking for bloodstains. There aren't any... The blood must have already...seeped inside."

What a way to end such a magnificent book! I'm utterly speechless. My mind is abuzz with many, many questions. I thought I had it, an understanding of what this was all about, but the last pages said 'no closure for you. Not today.'

On the surface, Sputnik Sweetheart is about the love triangle of K, Sumire, and Miu. K is attracted emotionally and sexually to Sumire but Sumire sees him as her friend and confidant while she's attracted both emotionally and sexually to Miu who doesn't share the same feeling towards her. Yeah. It's a mess. 

Everything went okay until Sumire met Miu and traveled with her to an island in Greece... where she disappeared without leaving a trace. But where did she go? What happened to her? Did she just leave? Was murdered? Committed suicide?

Or perhaps we just have to accept what the book tells us literally that she disappeared into another world.

Having read nearly 95% of Murakami's literary body of work, I can—to a certain degree—surely say that he's trying to build a shared universe in the majority of his novels. The connections are all over the place in The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, 1Q84, Killing Commendatore, Tsuku Tazaka and His Years of Pilgrimage, After Dark, to name but a few. It's not about the 'Murakami Bingo' of weird ear fetishes and jazz and unexplained vanishings and cats and moons, etc. These are but consequences of his world-building. It's about the rules that govern the shared universe, the philosophy, the principles that affect everyone and everything in his stories. 

One wouldn't be aware of these rules if they pick up one book and are done with Murakami. It's like trying to solve a jigsaw puzzle with only one piece while the other pieces are missing. That's why one should read a great deal of Murakami to at least come to an understanding of the ways of his universe. For instance, one of these rules is this: 'Dreams are realities.' Ergo, what happens in a dream affects reality.

The reason I mentioned that specific rule is because it plays a major part in Sputnik Sweetheart. For the longest time, I've been dreading to approach this book. It took me three years to give it a try. At first, I thought it'd be something about the drama of complicated relationships. And it is. But it's more than that. It's a thorough analysis of the human condition and the universal search to alleviate the loneliness and alienation of our world... even if this pursuit compels us to traverse another reality (which is possible in Sputnik Sweetheart).

The book is dense when it comes to how it is interpreted. If you put in enough time going through the catacombs of Reddit and Quora, you'll find outrageous theories concerning rape, murder, and suicide. After the ending, the aftertaste will last you a couple of restless nights thinking about what you read and what actually happened. This, by itself, is one of the reasons why the memory of this book will always stay with you.

I believe that the central theme revolves around 'change' and how it affects the very person that makes us who we are. Every one of the characters dreads the future and what hides beneath its sleeves. K is afraid of a world without Sumire. Sumire wants to be with Miu and abandons the things she loves to do (smoking and writing for instance) to make that happen. Miu puts her piano career behind her to become a shell of her own self. 

Regardless of the reasons happening normally or abnormally, change is inevitable. It will happen whether you like it or not. The question is, how will you deal with it and finally accept it. That, I believe, is what Murakami is trying to say.

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Summary:

Not recommended as your first book by Murakami, but for experienced readers with his style and shenanigans, it'd prove a very stimulating read. I enjoyed every page. The beginning is a drag, but once you reach the middle, reality and unreality will go hand in hand, and what you are left with is an impression of it all, a feeling.

"A Thousand Splendid Suns" by Kahled Hosseini (2007)

This is my first novel by Hosseini, and without a shadow of a doubt, Hosseini can write and can write well. Having seen The Kite Runner, I had inklings about what the story of A Thousand Splendid Suns might be. It should be emotional and about Afghanistan... but nevertheless, overwhelmingly tragic.

"There's only one, only one skill a woman like you and me needs in life, and they don't teach it at school... Only one skill. And it's this: endure."

The book traces the story of two main characters, Mariam and Laila, and how they endure the adversities of life in Afghanistan (from surviving the Soviet invasion to the chaos of Islamic militias to the arrival of the Taliban).

In essence, A Thousand Splendid Suns is a political critique (that sounds at times personal) of militant Islam's presence in Afghanistan and its impact on its people, most especially on women: how it crushes their dreams of being someone of some importance to society, how it isolates them and pushes them deeper in burrows in a world like Orwell's 1984 with all the constant "It's haram. It's taboo. It's forbidden", how it keeps reminding them that the sole reason for their existence is to be breeding machines and nothing more... 

"In a few years, this little girl will be a woman who will make small demands on life, who will never burden others, who will never let on that she too has had sorrows, disappointments, dreams that have been ridiculed."

In my opinion, this is exactly the fault in Hosseini's manner of writing, and why it prevented me from giving the book five stars. In general, the way he wrote felt 'directed', 'two dimensional', and involved 'omission'. In this book, he pushes the liberal western narrative to the max and presents Muslims as backward, women-slaving warlords who know nothing but either 'get laid or get slain' in the name of their creed. Perhaps, I'm overreacting. But could you blame me (as a clueless-about-Islam reader) when I got my impression of it from a misogynist, polygenous, pedophilic, wife-beating character called Rasheed? I thought so, because Hosseini didn't show us another good character who could present real Islam without marring its picture except for a tiny, tiny side character. I bet Hosseini wanted to promote a book in Western societies that knew nothing about Islam or cared about only cementing a certain stereotype of it... and it paid him off. That's why his biased narrative is criminally catastrophic. Just because certain groups misinterpret their own religion does not mean the whole thing is a bad apple. 

On the other hand, it would be criminally unfair to overlook the strengths of the book and what made it a powerful cry for the oppressed. The prose is simple and without exaggeration, peppered with political milestones (which I appreciated because I didn't know anything about the history of Afghanistan). The main characters, Mariam and Laila, are believable. Some reviewers argue that they're 'victim bespoke characters', meaning they are superficial and made specifically to seize readers' sympathies. I believe they're a great example of 'dynamic characters'. Just like a river, they are constantly changing and adapting and retaliating. 

"A woman who will be a rock in a riverbed, enduring without complaint, her grace not sullied but shaped by the turbulence that washes over her."

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Summary: 

The book is good when it comes to human misfortune and the struggle to have decent human rights, but it blocks the other voices. In other words, it dictates how we should feel about what we read, and leaves no room for actually using our minds as readers and judging things and people for what they really are.  

"You Will Never Be Forgotten" by Mary South (2021)

 

A collection of sci-fi-peppered short stories about the bond between two persons joined by their shared context [a caregiver and a patient/ an interviewer and an interviewee/ a mother and a daughter/ etc] and 

the effects of this relationship on both of them. The focus of these stories revolves around themes of grief and coping, individualism, disappointment, motherhood, and love.

There's a pronounced structure to South's style where she dunks the reader right into the world of the story before she slowly and methodically unveils the mystery. This unique approach 'contrigued' me; it sort of confused me as well as intrigued me. 

One of the issues I've had was the diction used. I thought it was a bit... ornate –not purple– just a bit stylistic. 

Mary South is a truly capable writer. She's got the diction, the style, the imagination, the guts to experiment. Yet, something is missing. This book felt unreachable. I couldn't relate to the characters or the stories on a deeper level. It wasn't a matter of soullessness. The stories have a heart, but the beating is so low, it's barely perceptible. What led me to this feeling was the gamble of the skeleton of the story. The structure and mood of the stories promised shock, plot twists, something, anything, but all I got were flat denouements leading the characters into realization-recognition-acknowledgment-acceptance of their situations. I'm not saying this is bad. Realism is necessary when talking about human relationships, but promising something and not keeping it. That is bad. It's like watching a movie trailer and getting hyped over the action scenes, but when the movie comes out, it turns out we were tricked by false advertising.

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My impressions of each one of the stories:

Keith Prime: (2.5)

In a world in the future where human bodies are harvested from donors of benighted clones called Keiths, a nurse gets attached to a particular Keith with a mole. 

Nothing fancy happens here. The light humor is sweet.

The Age of Love: (3.5)

A male nurse works at a home to care for convalescents when his coworker tells him about the sex calls the old people make.

It's got the whole package of a good story. It's funny and dirty and warm and sad.

Frequently Asked Questions About Craniotomy: (1.5)

A pamphlet, a brochure, an interview (?) of FAQ about brain surgery subjectively answered by a surgeon dealing with grief and disappointment.

Darkly humorous. Painfully sad. Infinitely boring.

Architecture For Monsters: (1)

A former master's degree student's article about a leading female figure in the field of architecture who used to be his teacher.

The prose was so purple, it bullied my intellect.

The Promised Hostel: (2)

A bunch of backpackers breastfeed from a woman called Madeline. 

This is weird and perverse!

You Will Never Be Forgotten: (3.5)

A female content moderator develops an obsession with her rapist who works for a prestigious seed fund in Silicon Valley.

Humorous. Satirical. Realistic. So Black Mirror. So Murakamian. Loved it!

Camp Jabberwocky For Recovering Internet Trolls: (2.5)

A rehab camp for online trollers where one of the teens decides to run away and his friends go into a wild goose chase trying to find him.

Light-hearted. Funny. Insightful. 

To Save The Universe, We Also Must Save Our Selves: (1.5)

Fans are obsessed with a show called Starship Uprising and its leading actress.

Didn't click.

Realtor to the Damned: (1)

A realtor selling houses of the elderly inventing stories for self amusement.

A story about grief. 

Not Setsuko: (4)

A couple loses their daughter and decides to make a clone out of her, but the reconstruction of the daughter's memories has produced a different copy.

My best! The composition is perfection. The main theme echoes throughout the story. And the ending was exactly what I needed.

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Summary:

The stories are a hit-or-miss due to their structure and the presentation of the climax. Some will resonate with readers. Most will not. If you decide to read the book, go for Not Sesuko/ You Will Never Be Missed.

CW: animal abuse/ child abuse/ incest/ graphic content and language

"The Silence" by DeLillo (2020)

 

The master of 'show but not not' did it again... or didn't. Anyway, in this novel, DeLillo is concerned about one question: "What happens when people live inside their phones?"

The story is straightforward, no side-tracks, no leeways. Jim and Tessa are on a flight from Paris en route to NY to meet their friends and become stranded in their apartment when an event of an apocalyptic scale disables anything electronic and digitized and submerges the globe in total silence. 

Not making it to the headlines, the catastrophe remains nameless and open to speculation: selective internet apocalypse/ communication screwup/ a mass power station failure/ cyberattack/ digital intrusion/ deviation in nature/ etc. The event is more like an undertow to the story, white noise in the background. 

It's not important. 

What matters here are the interactions of the characters themselves and how they first absorb the shock and adjust to the new reality as they fill in the silence by either 'talking talking talking' for the sake of talking or staring at the blank, black surfaces of their mobile phones and tablets and TVs, or engaging in awkward conversations, realizing that 'each has become a mystery to the others', strangers in a strange world. And, paradoxically enough, some others are rejoicing as they 'accepted the shutdown' when Max says 'All my life I've been waiting for this without knowing' which instantly reminded me of Haruki Murakami's 'Everyone, deep in their hearts, is waiting for the end of the world to happen'.

The first third of the book was rough and bumpy. The exposition and dialogues were extremely and painfully jarring as the narrative 'skipped and skidded for a while' just like the plane crash landing. The reading experience felt like a bunch of AIs making snippets of exchanges. I admit, DeLillo is brilliant at the sentence level, but so terrible at the conversation level. Eighty+ years and he doesn't know how normal chit-chat works. I'm not making that up, and he sort of admits it, "much of what the couple said to each other seemed to be a function of some automated process". Luckily, when I got over the state of 'totally impaired orientation' and got a sense of the context, I felt that dread before the disaster, that restless calm before the calamity, that thrill of mixed curiosity and anticipation and elation when something truly bad somewhere is happening and we're at its fringes, safe and not safe.

If DeLillo was aiming for the readers to feel these two distinct feelings on purpose—growing distant from the characters' dysfunctional interactions at the beginning and vicariously relating to their experiences later—then, I believe, the master of 'show but not tell' did it again. The two different impressions mimic the shock and the aftershock: first, you're feeling confused and don't know what's happening, but after the event is over, you begin to rationalize what has just happened.

Brilliant!

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Summary:

Don DeLillo's The Silence is 90% similar to Ruman Alam's Leave the World Behind, or is it the other way around? That's weird since both of these books were published in the same year, 2020. Or perhaps the collective panicking caused by the COVID-19 outbreak in 2019 was to blame. Regardless, The Silence concerns itself more with the prevalent, chronic dependency on technology rather than the event that caused its shutdown.

Forget the low reviews, go for it blindly, and make up your own impression of it. Personally, I found it subtle and smart. DeLillo is treating prose as an impressionist, sprinkling ideas here and there, and it's up to the readers to make a picture that makes sense to them.

"Piercing" by Ryu Murakami (2008)

 

A psychological thriller of protagonists with flawed logic about channeling traumatic experiences. It's dark definately and not everyone might stomach the themes discussed here and the graphic descriptions.

I wouldn't say this was Ryu Murakami's best, but what made a positive impression on me was the structure where the narrative hops between the two protagonists and lets us see the world through their eyes.

"Earthlings" by Sayaka Murata (2020)

 

"Earthlings. This is a funny word I haven't heard of in ages," I thought to myself. "Kinda reminding me of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. I'm so digging it." 

So, I started reading it right away, and my thoughts of it were like: 

Ohh, a nice family reunion. Japanese mountains. Festivals. Lanterns. Ancestors. Oh, a boy meets a girl. How cute! How adorable! Huh! We're back to cram school. It's okay. We still got our friend. We'll see fireworks and dress in yugata kimonos. Plus. The teacher is nice and handsome like those boy bands and... wait just sec. What's that h— OH MY GOD! This isn't happening! What the flying fuck is happening?! I didn't see that coming. Nope! That escalated waaaay too fast, I donno what to feel!!!

I wish it stopped at that, but no, it was just getting started.

Earthlings is seriously not for the faint-hearted. What makes it so is how easy-going and straightforward the prose and narrative style are, so straightforward to the point that the book splashes the reader's face with things unimaginable matter-of-factly, and then says, 'Deal with it.'

There were a few instances when I literally dreaded reading forward because the story was too much for me. Earthlings tops this list without dispute. It has this inviting atmosphere that makes you feel relaxed and cozy, and actually want to be living in that world, but then, without a hint, it catches you off guard and twists your psyche in horrible ways. But that is the point, the trap, the lure, isn't it? How else the shock value would be quadrupled in effect? 

Anyway, satire works best if writers blow the characters and their actions out of proportion so they can highlight the themes discussed. Clearly, Murata is just so fed up with society's values, and its assessment of one's worth: how should they dress, eat, talk, act, sleep with another, etc. It's predeterminism vs free will. Are we truly free to do whatever we want, and to what extent, or are we slaves not just to our genes but to society's rules, to what she refers to as 'the Factory' whose sole purpose is to produce babies who will grow up to produce more babies, sort of like living life just for the sake of living life?

In this sense, the book can be looked upon as an example of escapism. Think of it as Into the Wild minus all the disturbing stuff, where the protagonist feels alienated and longs for a basic, two-dimensional understanding of the universe, where s/he yearns to return to the roots of nature, and shed all of humanity behind and all its confusing rules and constrictions by committing the unthinkable.

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Summary:

Why do you have to be so weird, Japan?!

"Bunny" by Mona Awad (2019)

 

Surreal, absurd, satirical, and not in the least entertaining. It's a trap book that everyone cheered for and appraised which prompted me to give it a try and see what's what. 

I wish I hadn't.

On second thought...

I'm glad I had.

But then again...

It's not even worth considering.

All I can say is it was a love-hate relationship, or perhaps, a mildly tolerant-hate relationship. Sometimes I wanted to gut the book and set it on fire. Sometimes I thought it was onto something of some worth. But mostly, I wanted to just use it as toilet paper. 

There are two layers to the story: the literal and the metaphorical. Literally, it's about self-conscious, passive-aggressive, deeply troubled Samantha who is a grad student in an avante-garde school called Warren for creative writing. She's the black duck of her girl cohort in an MFT program as she tries so hard—but doesn't admit it—to fit in with a bunch of 'mean girls' who are in some sort of a cult, who are waaaay over the top with their girly attachment to each other, cooing and hugging and eating everything tiny and cute. The cult is sort of like A-ha's take on me as the girls turn bunnies into human boys which symbolizes writing drafts.

Metaphorically, however, Bunny is about the process of creative writing while being self-aware and self-critical of one's work. In essence, Bunny is about a real-life writer writing about writing whereas a grad student writer is having a block and writing about writing.

The premise sounds promising but the execution didn't catch up to it. Many things stood in the way. Throughout the book, Awad was trying—let me add—too hard to slough off the vernacular of nowadays prose, the overused cliches, the exhausted molds of dialogue dynamics, of plot progression, and came up with expressions that were unique and creative, but, sadly, they came out weird, awkward, and ill-fitting. I know. I know. This might be an exaggeration on my part... not as exaggerated as Awad's attempt at the avant-garde and completely going off the rails. For example, "She is cherry blossoms falling. She is serious moonlight. She is shivering green leaves." Seriously! Who writes like that?! The reading experience wasn't fun; it felt like reading the scribbles of a toddler. My cringe spectrum was maxed out in this book, it made me feel like a spider curling up. And the abusive use of similes was just on another level.

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Summary:

Apparently, this isn't my cuppa tea, but it might be for others. I realized I was not the target audience. That's why it didn't click on me. If you're up for a millennial, washed-down version of Chuck Palahniuk's style on drugs, then, sure, go for it.

"The Committed" by Viet Thanh Nguyen "2021"

The Committed is the second book of the series of The Sympathizer. It picks up where we left the protagonist, Vo Danh (nameless), in the first book on his way to Paris as he and his blood brother, Bon, attempted to flee the now communist Vietnam in search of a life in the land of his father. 

By far, this is my most maimed book; marks and notes are all over it. Luckily, it's a digital copy. Anyway. This book is dense and juicy, oozing with big ideas. If I could, I would've highlighted the whole thing.

The Committed is different from The Sympathizer when it comes to the purpose of the main guy. In the first book, he is a spy with a broad mission to inform on any insurgencies by the American-backed-up South Vietnamese in America. In this book, he's no longer tied to anything. He roams the world wherever the wind stirs him. He's purposeless in a meaningless world.

The protagonist is on a relentless hunt for the truth, principles, for idealism, for something to rely on that is inherently good and solid and unchanging, for consistency. That's why he keeps shifting and changing his beliefs over and over: from catholicism to atheism (because, perhaps, of his pedophilic father who neglected and disavowed him), from communism to a capitalist drug dealer (because of the Viet Cong's reeducation program). So he's an ex-theist, ex-commie, ex-mole, ex-something. The guy, according to Juan Cortez from Far Cry 6, 'got more ex's than anyone's porn search history.' 

Throughout the book, Vo Danh isn't anywhere near satisfaction. And it's quite normal because what he's looking for is something akin to a fairy tale, a holy grail, a fountain of youth sort of a pursuit, because it's ideal, and everything ideal is prone to corruption. There's no black and white. "Corruption is a way of life... That’s how the world spins, gives us night and day." He believed in revolution and communism because "capitalism has become the worst version." i.e. it became corrupt. And when the heavy price was paid for the revolution to succeed, he was shocked to see what he's been fighting for turn into what he's fighting all along. "three million people dead for this revolution? We had simply traded one Repressive State Apparatus for another one, and the only difference was that it was our own."

The moral of the story: do not draw a halo on anyone or anything and idolize it because 'nothing is sacred! Everything can be transgressed'.

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Summary:

There's a saying that goes 'If you don't want to offend anyone, don't talk about either politics or religion'. The Committed is anything but politics and religion. So, if you're easily offended by these topics, this book is definitely not for you. Viet Thanh Nguyen has a voice that is powerful, shameless, and unapologetic. 

The series is a feast for philoso-philias, a platform for political debates, and a hell of an entertainment show of dark humor and cynical absurdities.

"The Sympathizer" by Viet Thanh Nguyen (2015)

 

As the bloody, merciless conflict in the Gaza Strip continues, I became more interested in observing parallels between the war there and what happened in Vietnam. I didn't want to read about the American perspective, but mainly was interested in reading the Vietnamese. Hence, my choice of reading this book regardless of its prizes won and its glowing reviews.

I must admit, I was intimidated by the book's number of pages and how densely the words populated each one, particularly when its pace was similar to an 'arithmetic tortoise', and most especially, when the dialogues were crammed with full-blown musings and flashbacks. But as I went on, I realized I wrongly approached the book. It wasn't about an action-spiced spy novel more than a reflection on the reality of the people living in the war-torn leftovers of a country. It provides a thorough psychological and analytical account of wars, occupations, freedom, and most especially, of revolutions/ideologies and how they embody the concept of Harvey Dent's "You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain".

With that being said, I can safely say that The Sympathizer is more than just a novel. It refuses to be bound by the perimeters of its pages and cover. It goes beyond, waaaay beyond. This is life (with all its happiness and tragedies and laughter and agony) perfectly encapsulated in the form of a novel. Viet Thanh Nguyen took me by surprise. His voice is crystal clear and strong and, dare I say it, is fairly equal to one deserving of the Nobel Prize. Heck! His voice is a character of its own. (either he was projecting or not). There's a perceptible fluidity in the structure of his jokes and an eclectic fluency in his words and phrases. 

The book was brilliant up to 50% then dropped to quite boring between 50-80% then aimed for the stars and became a masterpiece in the last 20%. 

There are unforgettable moments during the book where I literally laughed out loud (the poor squid scene for example) and moments where all ambient sounds and lights around me were gone because those scenes were so intense and painfully graphic.

Viet Nguyen has proved himself to be a master storyteller who's able to convey his thoughts in an entertaining and engaging manner, and one who isn't afraid to experiment with style and narration (as long as it serves a valid purpose), shifting from a realist approach to a quasi-surreal one, or from second perspective to a third.

What really blew my mind was the central scene of the raping of the agent. Yes, it's despicable and horrendous and all, but beneath the physical and the literal, there's one of the most powerful metaphors I've ever read. It's all about Vietnam, that beautiful ripe country, and what has been done to her, by outsider colonialists (the French), their 'freedom spreaders' replacements (the Americans), and sadly but quite naturally, by the Vietnamese people themselves (communists or otherwise).

"The world watched what happened to our country and most of the world did nothing. Not only that—they also took great pleasure in it. You are no exception."

It's not about the American/Vietnamese war, about the atrocities committed in the name of ideological purging (namely the rise of communism), or—according to the narrator—in the name of freedom and independence (the Viet Cong). It's not about the millions of lives wasted on both sides. It's not about the Fall of Saigon or the Liberation of Saigon. It's about what such a pointless war has done to the people of Vietnam regardless of their position. And no one can truly see the crux of the matter unless they are of two minds, a sympathizer. That's the brilliance of the book. It doesn't tell you that the narrator is pro-anything. Is he a true communist? An Americanized Asian? A spy? For whom exactly? Don't know. Don't care. What matters here is that when he commits to a side, he tells it as it is. No tints. No shades. Just the plain truth.

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Summary:

The Sympathizer is an instant classic that should be read, dissected, and analyzed. It's rich in metaphors that are accessible to the common reader. It's a story by the people suffering for the people suffering. There are so many things the book wants to confess to the readers, things about art and propaganda, about maternal complex, about wars and suffering, but the central theme is the duality of perspective, to see things objectively. Hence, the metaphor of the main character as having two minds, two ways of thinking, two convictions... just like Vietnam, north of south.