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The Sympathizer
- A Novel
- Narrated by: Francois Chau
- Length: 13 hrs and 53 mins
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Publisher's summary
Pulitzer Prize, Fiction, 2016
A profound, startling, and beautifully crafted debut novel, The Sympathizer is the story of a man of two minds, someone whose political beliefs clash with his individual loyalties.
It is April 1975, and Saigon is in chaos. At his villa, a general of the South Vietnamese army is drinking whiskey and, with the help of his trusted captain, drawing up a list of those who will be given passage aboard the last flights out of the country. The general and his compatriots start a new life in Los Angeles, unaware that one among their number, the captain, is secretly observing and reporting on the group to a higher-up in the Viet Cong.
The Sympathizer is the story of this captain: a man brought up by an absent French father and a poor Vietnamese mother, a man who went to university in America, but returned to Vietnam to fight for the Communist cause. A gripping spy novel, an astute exploration of extreme politics, and a moving love story, The Sympathizer explores a life between two worlds and examines the legacy of the Vietnam War in literature, film, and the wars we fight today.
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By: Mohammed Hanif
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Guapa
- By: Saleem Haddad
- Narrated by: Fajer Al-Kaisi
- Length: 9 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Rasa spends his days translating for Western journalists and pining for the nights when he can sneak his lover, Taymour, into his room. One night Rasa's grandmother - the woman who raised him - catches them in bed together. The following day Rasa is consumed by the search for his best friend, Maj, a fiery activist and drag queen star of the underground bar Guapa, who has been arrested by the police.
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Guapa
- By Mah Maass on 08-25-16
By: Saleem Haddad
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In the First Circle
- By: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Harry T. Willets - translator
- Narrated by: Derek Perkins
- Length: 31 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Moscow, Christmas Eve, 1949. The Soviet secret police intercept a call made to the American embassy by a Russian diplomat who promises to deliver secrets about the nascent Soviet Atomic Bomb program. On that same day, a brilliant mathematician is locked away inside a Moscow prison that houses the country's brightest minds. He and his fellow prisoners are charged with using their abilities to sleuth out the caller's identity, and they must choose whether to aid Joseph Stalin's repressive state - or refuse and accept transfer to the Siberian Gulag camps, and almost certain death.
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One of the five finest novels written in the 20th Century
- By Ellis D Vener on 04-08-19
By: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and others
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The Centurions
- By: Jean Larteguy, Robert D. Kaplan - foreward
- Narrated by: Paul Woodson
- Length: 17 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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When The Centurions was first published in 1960, readers were riveted by the thrilling account of soldiers fighting for survival in hostile environments. They were equally transfixed by the chilling moral question the novel posed: how to fight when the "age of heroics is over". As relevant today as it was half a century ago, The Centurions is a gripping military adventure, an extended symposium on waging war in a new global order, and an essential investigation of the ethics of counterinsurgency.
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Superbly read. Unbelievably timely
- By Benjamin on 05-05-21
By: Jean Larteguy, and others
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The Quiet American
- By: Graham Greene
- Narrated by: Joseph Porter
- Length: 6 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Alden Pyle, an idealistic young American, is sent to Vietnam to promote democracy amidst the intrigue and violence of the French war with the Vietminh, while his friend, Fowler, a cynical foreign correspondent, looks on.
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Terrible narrator nearly derails Greene novel.
- By Richard on 07-12-12
By: Graham Greene
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Sapphire Skies
- By: Belinda Alexandra
- Narrated by: Caroline Lee
- Length: 15 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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2000: The wreckage of a downed WWII fighter plane is discovered in the forests near Russia's Ukrainian border.The aircraft belonged to Natalya Azarova, ace pilot and pin-up girl for Soviet propaganda, but the question of her fate remains unanswered. Was she a German spy who faked her own death, as the Kremlin claims? Her lover, Valentin Orlov, now a highly-decorated general, refuses to believe it. Lily, a young Australian woman, has moved to Moscow to escape from tragedy.
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A Disturbing Disappointment
- By Sara on 08-07-14
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Shame
- By: Salman Rushdie
- Narrated by: Vikas Adam
- Length: 11 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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The novel that set the stage for his modern classic, The Satanic Verses, Shame is Salman Rushdie's phantasmagoric epic of an unnamed country that is "not quite Pakistan". In this dazzling tale of an ongoing duel between the families of two men - one a celebrated wager of war, the other a debauched lover of pleasure - Rushdie brilliantly portrays a world caught between honor and humiliation.
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Should have quit at chapter 2
- By G. Miller on 06-23-23
By: Salman Rushdie
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In the Country
- Stories
- By: Mia Alvar
- Narrated by: Nancy Wu, Don Castro
- Length: 13 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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These nine globe-trotting, unforgettable stories from Mia Alvar, a remarkable new literary talent, vividly give voice to the women and men of the Filipino diaspora. Here are exiles, emigrants, and wanderers uprooting their families from the Philippines to begin new lives in the Middle East, the United States, and elsewhere - and sometimes turning back again.
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My introduction to Filipino literature and culture
- By Amazon Customer on 03-28-16
By: Mia Alvar
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Golden Earrings
- By: Belinda Alexandra
- Narrated by: Caroline Lee
- Length: 20 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Catalina, grand-daughter of Spanish refugees, is a disciplined student with the School of the Paris Opera Ballet. Little gets inthe way of her career until the visit of an otherworldly being, who leaves her a mysterious pair of golden earrings. Given a quest, Catalina realises she must explore her own Spanish heritage and makes the connection between the visitor and ‘La Rusa’, a young Andalusian flamenco star. La Rusa died in exile in Paris in 1952, her death ruled as suicide. But as Catalina begins to discover, there were those in the community, who had good reason for wanting La Rusa dead.
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Fabulous story
- By Paddington on 10-19-12
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The Kindly Ones
- By: Jonathan Littell
- Narrated by: Grover Gardner
- Length: 39 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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The chilling fictional memoir of Dr. Maximilien Aue, a former Nazi officer who has reinvented himself, many years after the war, as a middle-class family man and factory owner in France. Max is an intellectual steeped in philosophy, literature, and classical music. He is also a cold-blooded assassin and the consummate bureaucrat. Through the eyes of this cultivated yet monstrous man, we experience in disturbingly precise detail the horrors of the Second World War and the Nazi genocide of the Jews.
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Office politics in hell
- By Maine Colonial 🌲 on 04-02-13
By: Jonathan Littell
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Topaz
- By: Leon Uris
- Narrated by: David de Vries
- Length: 11 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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On the eve of the Cuban Missile Crisis in Paris, 1962, Devereaux and Nordstrom uncover Soviet plans to ship nuclear arms. But when nobody acts after sharing his findings, Devereaux becomes the target of an assassination attempt and soon realizes the plot extends far beyond Cuba - and himself. A thrilling and well-paced novel filled with Cold War intrigue, Topaz features two agents on a journey around the world to save NATO and themselves.
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A spy thriller in disguise
- By Shmuel M on 04-14-19
By: Leon Uris
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Tough but important
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What listeners say about The Sympathizer
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- JKC
- 07-15-17
A clinical eye for the hypochondria of exile
This is a novel about the Vietnam War. But it is unique in that: a) there are no Americans in it, and b) the war is already over. For everybody except the Vietnamese, that is.
We have come to think of the Vietnam War as an American conflict. Donald Goldstein deemed it “the most traumatic experience for the United States in the twentieth century”). How much more must it be so for the Vietnamese themselves? We don’t think too much about that question. (Try Googling “Vietnam conflict”. You’ll get more references to 60’s protest music than to Vietnamese society.)
But the themes are even more profound than that. This is not just a novel about a shooting war in southeast Asia; it is about the conflict between the individual and the state. To what extent does the culture in which we are raised supply the social environment and physical habitat we require to flourish?
Viet Thanh Nguyen has mastered the art of writing fiction from the viewpoint of displaced persons. Some authors – Faulkner, Steinbeck – illuminate a region through the eyes of its denizens. Nguyen’s perspective is the opposite – he studies the individual by removing him from his natural habitat and analyzing what happens to him.
In “The Sympathizer”, Nguyen studies a varied population of Vietnamese displaced by the war. The largest cohort is composed of ARVN (South Vietnamese Army) officers and their families exiled to southern California after the fall of Saigon. But there are also individual specimens of alienated NVA/VLF partisans: one man estranged from family and friends by horrible disfigurement suffered during the war; another whose humanity has been replaced by political slogans; a woman ostracized by her own family for her affair with a French priest. All observed and reported by her biracial son who is also a sort of double political agent: the most stateless and equivocal character in the whole novel.
Nguyen has a clinical eye for the symptoms that beset the uprooted - the diminution of stature they suffer when removed from their community, the despondency that sets in when they lose their place in society. Chapter 6 has a poignant passage cataloguing the humble Orange County occupations of men who once wielded military might in Vietnam. Nguyen finishes with a brilliant riff about these men “moldering in the stale air of subsidized apartments, as their testes shrivel, day by day, consumed by the metastasizing cancer called assimilation…”
But the Sympathizer sees the other side of the war’s dislocation as well. Back in Vietnam, the victors suffer their own sorts of alienation. The community in which the Vietnamese people have flourished for centuries has been replaced by a sterile and inhuman ideology.
So, does the State nourish the individual, or crush his spirit? Which is to be preferred, Imperialism or Communism? Catholicism or Capitalism? In his isolation cell in a Vietnamese re-education camp, the narrator reaches his own, searing conclusions.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Bonnie Nolan
- 02-15-18
Fantastic
This book is incredibly moving and brilliant. Nguyen is a master wordsmith and storyteller - highly recommend.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Dawn
- 07-17-18
Relentless but beautiful writing
I think whoever called in the Vietnamese Portnoy’s Complaint had it right. Complex and incredible writing but pretty exhausting for me in the long run with a lot of philosophizing, politics and personal angst along with the back and forth on whose side our hero was really on if anyone’s, which I guess is probably the point! The politics are deep and sad. A time in history which of course our war in Vietnam screwed up even more. Our hero is of mixed race who is hated and not accepted by most, anywhere he lives. But since he’s a spy does that matter, I’m still not sure. It does help explain his ambiguity though. Also told from a very male point of view which did also wear me out by the end, his relationships or desire for certain women just ultimately all about him. And for him to have to finally mention the size of his penis...oh brother. But no spoiler alerts here you’ll have to listen to the book to find out.
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- Jonathan Fein
- 10-28-17
wow. heavy, thoughtful story
wow. heavy, thoughtful story. a significant story which puts you deep inside Vietnam's recent past and psychology.
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- Andre
- 08-20-16
Tale of Two Minds
What did you love best about The Sympathizer?
What I loved best about The Sympathizer was the writing. It was poetic and epic. It was also creative in its use of a confessional. The second thing I loved best about this novel was its structure. I listened to the last and first three chapters a second time and noticed that people and things that showed up in the first chapters appeared in the last, such as a rucksack with a false bottom. Nguyen tightly wove his tale to tie everything together.
What other book might you compare The Sympathizer to and why?
I compared The Sympathizer to Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities because both books were about the excesses of revolutions. Nguyen in his second paragraph also mirrored Dickens' use of time anaphora in the opening paragraph of Two Cities: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, ..." Both books are about two-ness.
Other books that inspired Nguyen were Alexandre Dumas' The Three Musketeers, because the sympathizer and his friends compared their friendship to that of the famous French trio. Also, the sympathizer, a Eurasian, found sympathies with Dumas, a mulatto.
Richard Condon's brainwashing, Cold War thriller The Manchurian Candidate is another inspiration as well as Ron Chernow's biography of Founding Father Alexander Hamilton who was born a bastard and opponents never let him forget it. Ralph Ellison's The Invisible Man is another influence because the sympathizer speaks of his own invisibility in cultures and blending into settings and crowds like a chameleon.
What about Francois Chau’s performance did you like?
Francois Chau melted into the characters so that I saw and heard them and not him. Francois Chau is the ultimate sympathizer when it comes to performing great books.
Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?
Yes, I wanted to listen to The Sympathizer all in one sitting. I finished it in five days.
Any additional comments?
This Pulitzer-winning novel is one of my favorite recent novels. It is also a conversation starter. I am thrilled that I listened to this book, and I highly recommend it..
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- P. Smith
- 10-04-16
To be caught in a spider web of super powers
Told from the point of view of a Vietnamese native, it gives the perspective of the lose /lose situation the French then American wars put them in and how dehumanizing and futile it all was. Written very well it is not depressing, despite the subject matter.
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- Suzanne Weatherman
- 09-03-16
Priceless
The thought provoking themes in this book are so important they are priceless. It was not easy to listen to, but I am happy to have done so.
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- Joslyn Long
- 03-06-19
Excellent listen
I enjoyed this audiobook very much. it's a novel I've had on my reading list for a long time, but I'm actually glad I listened to it rather than read it. the narrator's voice and accent brought the main character to life for me. There were parts that were very difficult to listen to, but war is a very difficult reality, so those parts that are graphic and sad are necessary. There was never a moment I was bored. Every bit had my attention. Highly recommend, but for mature audiences.
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- deborah
- 07-18-16
Identity
This novel is timely as we struggle as a nation with or past, present and future identity. The Sympathizer is a novel about a man and a nation struggling it's just that. I could not put this book down both listening to it and reading it as time may allow. The narrator is excellent and does not interfere with the voice of the book. Vietnam Than Nguyen wove a complex narrative and pieces of history and identity into a novel that flowed like water. I could not stop reading or thinking about it. Although I knew a fair amount about the war, the resistance movement post war was new to me as were the details of the reeducation camps.
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- Erin Bohmbach
- 10-21-16
Astonishing!
At once visceral and ethereal, Francois Chau's narration truly engulfs you in the haunting and occasionally hilarious universe of this text. Viet Thahn Nguyen is an absolute force of an author & I can't wait to read whatever he writes next.
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