If you’re a fan of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Vietnam War-heavy 2016 novel, The Sympathizer, it’d be worth getting a subscription to HBO if you don’t have one to watch the sprawling new seven-part limited series that begins on Sunday night, April 14, and will subsequently will be streamed on Max.
The novel, which received the Pulitzer Prize in fiction, is a bold, brash, beautifully crafted tale told by a never-identified-by-name main character, a double agent during the the war with the ARVN and CIA, and a one-man sleeper cell in the U.S. afterward. Viet Nguyen uses the narrator’s singular voice to laser in on the American war in Vietnam and the postwar political and social landscape there and among the Vietnamese expatriate community in the U.S.
It’s a rapidly moving, sardonic, sometimes brutal, and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny novel that showcases Viet Nguyen’s insights into the fallout from the Vietnam War among those who took part in it and the civilians caught up in it. Added bonus: The TV series includes Robert Downey Jr. playing four different parts.
You can watch Arts Editor Marc Leepson’s November 2021 “Dispatches” web series interview with Viet Nguyen, in which they discuss The Sympathizer and his other work, on the “Dispatches” page on our website at https://vvaveteran.org/videos Scroll down to Episode No. 12. And you can read the great David Willson’s review on Books in Review II at https://vvabooks.wordpress.com/2015/04/06/the-sympathizer-by-viet-thanh-nguyen/
From left, below Hoa Xuande, who plays the main character, with Fred Nguyen Khan, and Duy Nguyen in The Sympathizer.
–April 13, 2024
