A Kind Of Magic

I finished Nguyen's The Sympathizer today, and I'm conflicted about it. Specifically I'm not entirely sure of the exact superlatives I want to apply to this wonderful novel, though entirely convinced of its brilliance. I can't quite figure out whether I think of it as a superbly crafted text, pursuing a necessary thesis with regard to the nations and ethnicities at its centre, a kind of thesis-novel in the best possible sense, or evidence of an extraordinarily inspired writer who may have individual greatness within him regardless of subject matter. (Both?)

In a sense, it doesn't really matter because either way we have a great book. Remarkably Nguyen goes some way to doing justice to the terrible cruelty at the heart of the Vietnamese experience of the war and its aftermath in the dark violence of some of the later sequences in the novel. I didn't see this coming at all when reading the first half, but there wasn't any contrivance at all in the plotting. Everything just falls into place.

I suppose the strangest thing for me as a reader was the way I turned Vietnamese as I was drawn in to the narrator's world. At one level that sounds weirdly arrogant, as if making claims for some laudable capacity for empathy, but I don't mean it in that sense. The writer worked this magical transformation by addressing a Vietnamese audience so you are forced to live up to expectations, however shabbily you can manage it. Having a superbly observant guide helped considerably, I can tell you.