The sympathizer - Viet Thanh Nguyen

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So I really liked the book all the way through and then found the ending quite disappointing under essentially every point of view. A lot like 1984, but I have already read 1984.

Let’s focus on the good parts. It’s a really funny and weird book, touching deep topics with sarcastic or surreal tones. The narrator gets lost in his own train of thoughts and memories and then gets brutally back to reality. This results in lines such as the following:

Massacre is obscene. Three million dead is obscene. Masturbation, even with an admittedly nonconsensual squid? Not so much.

It’s a very powerful technique. If you keep reading about people dying horrible deaths it doesn’t seem like a big deal after a while. You need to zoom out and zoom in again to realize what is being described; better yet, talk about something completely different and abruptly move the focus back on the deaths, like it’s happening here. It works.

I’m now going through the bookmarks and highlighted parts of the book. I’ll report here the narrator’s five principles in talking to a woman, for future reference:

My first three principles in talking to a woman: do not ask permission; do not say hello; and do not let her speak first. […] Fourth principle: give a woman the chance to reject something else besides me. If she declined the cigarette, as any of our proper young women should, I had an excuse to take one myself, which gave me a few seconds to say something while she focused on my cigarette. […] Principle five: statements, not questions, were less likely to lead to no.

I don’t know why, but before reading the book I though the author was a woman. I think this description could only (amusingly) be written by a man:

They were too much to bear, as was my guitar, displaying its full, reproachful hips on my bed as I left.

I mean, if you do think about it, the middle part of a guitar looks a bit like hips, but sexualizing a guitar as a woman lying on the bed - I guess it makes sense a posteriori, but how do you even get there. Anyways.

I highlighted a lot of parts in the book, because there were a ton of good, concise observation. I’ll list some, in no particular order:

What I’m saying, why I’m telling you all this, is that my life once had a meaning. It had a purpose. Now it has none. I was a son and a husband and a father and a soldier, and now I’m none of that. I’m not a man, and when a man isn’t a man he’s nobody.

The last sentence is per se nonsensical, and yet it tells so much. This kind of thinking explains many irrational actions.

What am I dying for? he cried back. I’m dying because this world I’m living in isn’t worth dying for! If something is worth dying for, then you’ve got a reason to live.

These questions required either Camus or cognac, and as Camus was not available I ordered cognac.

In short, I was in a familiar place, the place of feeling unfamiliar, which I responded to in my usual fashion by arming myself with a gin and tonic, my first of the evening.

I had an abiding respect for the professionalism of career prostitutes, who wore their dishonesty more openly than lawyers, both of whom bill by the hour.

But I was also one of those unfortunate cases who could not help but wonder whether my need for American charity was due to my having first been the recipient of American aid.

Whatever people say about the General today, I can only testify that he was a sincere man who believed in everything he said, even if it was a lie, which makes him not so different from most.

Each had an M16 hanging from a shoulder strap, and each showed off a spare pair of testicles. These, on closer inspection, turned out to be two grenades clamped to either side of their belt buckles.