The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh NguyenMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
This is a book that made me feel kind of dumb, or uncultured, or too impatient. It won the Pulitzer. It is considered groundbreaking and all that. And I didn't feel like I really "got" it. It was about a Communist spy embedded in Vietnam. Parts of the book were about his life, his escape from Vietnam in the last days before the fall of Saigon, and about his lifelong friendship with two boys, one Communist, and one not. But the structure of the book (a confession), the climax (the revision of the confession), and the denouement (not completely even clear to me) were confusing. I enjoyed reading about the narrator's life and story, but the ending got too theoretical and fantastical for me.
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