Continuing To Impress

Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Sympathizer continues to impress in a big way. I was wondering whether the writer would maintain the effortless mastery of the narrative as demonstrated in the first half of the novel and the answer seems to be emphatically affirmative. There are some darkly violent stretches of writing in the second half but nothing is gratuitous. The excessive is rendered quite normal and the sense of a lived reality is pervasive.

I think I mentioned some comparisons to Catch 22 in my previous reference to Nguyen's novel. There are some superficial links in terms of satirical content, but the texts involve different kinds of satire. What links them is the simple brilliance in each of a fully realised world, brilliantly imagined.