The Nature of Things

  The Sympathizer who we met in Viet Thanh Nguyen's previous book has survived his time spent in a re-education camp run by his blood brother, Man. Now it is the 1980s and he and his other blood brother, Bon, are out of the camp and have made their way to Paris which is where we meet them in this book. The narrator is the only one of the two who knows that the re-education camp had been run by Man and that he is the one who was in charge of the torture which they endured there. The narrator who describes himself as a man of two faces and two minds has a voice that demands the reader's attention and that voice mesmerizes us during the first part of this book. It is an eccentric and fractious voice that makes this story memorable and hard to put down. We learn more about the narrator's history. We know that he was born in Vietnam and that he is half French, half Vietnamese. His father was a Catholic priest and this son has very conflicted feelings about the land of his father...

The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen My rating: 4 of 5 stars Since the mid 1970s, we have not lacked for literary and film retellings and interpretations of the Vietnam War. But all of these have been told almost exclusively from an American perspective. Although the war was fought in their country, decimated their land, and killed untold numbers of their people, we have not had the Vietnamese viewpoint of events. Viet Thanh Nguyen, with his first published novel, remedies that glaring lack for us. Nguyen is a Vietnamese-American. Born in Vietnam, he and his family were among the boat people who escaped following the fall of Saigon and the overrunning of the South by the North Vietnamese. He was raised in the United States and educated here, so he has a unique perspective of the war and its aftermath. With this novel, he has finally given voice to the previously voiceless Vietnamese people who endured the horror of the war. The novel is written as a confession. Our narrator, whose nam...