The Sympathizer

Summary

The Sympathizer is the 2015 debut novel by Vietnamese-American professor and writer Viet Thanh Nguyen. It depicts the anonymous narrator, a North Vietnamese mole in the South Vietnamese army, who stays embedded in a South Vietnamese community in exile in the United States after the end of the Vietnam War. While in the United States, the narrator describes being an expatriate and a cultural advisor on the production of an American film, closely resembling Platoon and Apocalypse Now, before returning to Vietnam as part of a guerrilla raid against the communists.