The Sympathizer – An Exquisite and Acute Political Satire

We were displaced persons, but it was time more than space that defined us. While the distance to return to our lost country was far but finite, the number of years it would take to close that distance was potentially infinite. Thus, for displaced people, the first question was always about time: When can I return?

“My book has something to offend everyone”, says Viet Thanh Nguyen, an associate Professor of English, American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California, whose debut novel 'The Sympathizer’ (published April 2015) went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Nguyen’s tale unfurls in the form of extended confession, written by an unnamed North Vietnamese spy or agent, simply addressed as ‘The Captain’. He works his way inside military and security establishment in Saigon, South Vietnam. After the city’s fall in 1975, he gets relocated to California with The General, and on the orders of North Vietnamese high command, the agent monitors the activities of the displaced members of southern Army. The Sympathizer is equal parts farcical spy story and a treatise on perplexed refugees, narrated through a beguiling voice that’s richly atmospheric, incendiary, poignant, and utterly unforgettable. In fact, the morally conflicted narrator draws comparison to the anti-heroes of Graham Greene and John le Carre. Nguyen’s revulsion and rage aimed towards the hypocrisy and idiocy of power-hungry humans also partly reminded me of Louis-Ferdinand Celine’s ‘Journey at the End of the Night’.

Nguyen says that his unnamed spy protagonist was inspired by a very famous spy named Pham Xuan An, who studied in Orange County, became friends with many Americans, and was silenced after the war. While there has been plenty of Vietnam War books from the perspective of the U.S. soldiers, and even few novels/memoirs depicting the Northener’s view of war (for eg, Last Night I Dreamed of Peace), The Sympathizer is unique because it’s narrator is knowledgeable enough to address and criticize all parties involved (in the war), and their dubious, extreme ideological fervor.  The Captain views himself as a committed communist, and yet he holds sympathy for the people he shadows. Moreover, his westernized internal culture alternately respects and hates what the western nation promises. If the Captain often feels that he is constantly in a position of conflict, belonging nowhere, it’s not just because he’s a spy. The Captain is of mixed-race heritage -- the bastard child of a French priest and a poor Vietnamese maid – making his loneliness not only professional, but existential.

The Captain’s only solace in life is the friendship he shares with Bon and Man, the trio sworn to be blood brothers way before their hardened teenage years. Now in his early 30s, The Captain works as personal aide to The General, the head of the South Vietnamese National Police. The novel opens with Saigon, the last stronghold territory of the South, falling into the hands of Viet Cong (in April 1975). The General has arranged a safe passage to US through CIA for his family, selected officers and their family. Forever leading an isolated life, the Captain decides to bring friend Bon and his family with him for US exile. Unbeknownst to Bon (a patriotic South Vietnamese soldier), and others the Captain is advised to go deep undercover by his handler (Captain has once studied college in US), who is none other than his other childhood friend Man. The Captain must report back on the activities of the General and American diplomats through coded letters. He dutifully reports the General’s attempts in California to raise a small army of expats, with the help of CIA and a Congressman, to liberate Vietnam from the communists.

Author/professor Viet Thanh Nguyen

 Confined to the suburbs of California, the fascinating middle-part of The Sympathizer turns the simple spy premise into a much complex commentary on refugee experience in American soil. By employing well-calibrated witty invective, our narrator deeply mocks the American dogma, its xenophobic authority, and penchant for cultural mores. In a branched-out story-line, the Captain becomes advisor to an American director, who is making a Vietnam War movie titled ‘The Hamlet’. The Captain contests with the Oscar-winning director (addressed simply as ‘The Auteur’, a reference to Coppola and his 1979 movie Apocalypse Now) to at least include a single Vietnamese voice in a movie about Vietnamese war. Parts are eventually created for Vietnamese characters, although the Captain is sneakily overpowered by the machinations of Hollywood. Author Nguyen directly quotes Coppola’s speech at Cannes (‘My movie is not about Vietnam; it is Vietnam’) as the words of ‘Auteur’ and depicts how the wonderful artistic work is problematic, in how it represents the Vietnamese or the whole of Southeast Asians. In an interview, Nguyen remarks that he has a ‘respect/hate relationship’ towards ‘Apocalypse Now’, and further adds that “the movie is a condemnation of American behavior, but also keeps the focus on Americans, since for Americans, it’s better to be the villains or antiheroes of their own story than to be the extras.” Equally hilarious and thoughtful is the Captain’s belief that Hollywood as part of the American political-military alliance:“Movies were America’s way of softening up the rest of the world, Hollywood relentlessly assaulting the mental defenses of audiences……… The point was that it was the American story they watched and loved, up until the day that they themselves might be bombed by the planes they had seen in American movies.”

Although The Sympathizer’s most subversive prose are reserved to the ugly pretensions of American imperialists, Nguyen remains unsparing towards atrocious principals of communists, and the cruelty of his own people. Not only the author exposes the worst of humanity in different quarters, he also avoids instilling unnecessary pieties to either Western or Eastern characters. The novel’s most harrowing third-act is an intimate study of the great disillusionment of revolutionaries, whose radicalized behavior wreaks havoc in both success and failures of the revolution. For the most part, Nguyen’s story and writing is very well-paced that it’s hard to not lose yourself to the progressively unfolding drama, abetted by funny ripostes. The Sympathizer, however, isn’t just a cerebral, literary thriller that only works on the surface. On closer reflection, we could identify profound treatment of universal themes like war, immigration, and displacement as well as personal themes, relating to memory and identity. The later themes lead to a satisfying conclusion that acknowledges solidarity, the need for compassion as opposed to allegiance for debased ideologies. The final outlook offers a bit of hope and a promise for possible redemption, even though the cauterizing experiences of war wouldn’t easily vanish. Altogether, Nguyen’s The Sympathizer (384 pages) is an incredible historical fiction, equipped with enlivening and raging high-brow style. The multi-faceted novel fills a vacuum in the ‘immigrant experience’ stories, providing voice to the oft belittled, caricaturized characters. 

Viet Thanh Nguyen: "The Sympathizer, Memory of the Vietnam War"

 

 

Night Film – A Tenacious Reporter’s Pursuit for Infernal Truth

You'll find that great artists don't love, live, fuck or even die like ordinary people. Because they always have their art. It nourishes them more than any connection to people. Whatever human tragedy befalls them, they're never too gutted, because they need only to pour the tragedy into their vat, stir in the other lurid ingredients, blast it over a fire. What emerges will be even more magnificent than if the tragedy had never occurred.

Have you heard about the legendary film-maker Stanislas Cordova? He has made 15 or so terrifying psychological horrors from the 1960s. More than a decade after his final film, the reverence for the director among his dedicated, obsessed fans have advanced dramatically, making them to throw secret underground screenings of his banned films. The ‘Cordovites’ also get-together through a flawlessly encrypted forum named ‘Blackboards’ to collect clues about Cordova’s fiercely enshrouded private life and to share crazy fans theories or other interesting tidbits. The film-maker’s radical philosophy of life and the indestructible darkness encircling his works has made the general public to equate his private life with the unmitigated debauchery of his movies. And, Mr. Cordova's long silence and very rare public appearances after his weird, short interview for ‘Rolling Stone’ in 1977 has only increased the speculations, regarding his enigmatic, if not ‘maniacal’ tendencies. From the late 1970s, he lives on his spooky, 300-acre compound in upstate New York, where he makes his films without ever having to leave his lavish mansion. Perhaps as a cinephile, now you might begin to wonder why you haven’t heard about the great Stanislas Cordova? The terse explanation is that he doesn’t exist – at least not in the reality.   

The first 100 pages or so in Marsha Pessl’s second novel Night Film (her first novel ‘Special Topics In Calamity Physics’ was hailed by New York Times as one of the ’10 Best Books of 2006’) does very well in establishing the eerie cult surrounding the life and films of fictional movie director Stanislas Cordova. She conjures web pages, well warranted slideshows, forum posts, police investigation reports, and similar multimedia information providers to focus and augment our attention on the mysterious identity of Cordova. It’s pretty much a gimmick (at time akin to click-bait online articles), which could be easily misconstrued as ‘post-modernist’. But this nevertheless elevates the novel’s page-turning qualities, gradually immersing us into its vast atmosphere of terror and dread. Pessl largely succeeds in this myth-making. We don’t meet Cordova directly and only hear his alleged wisdom through the idolizers, yet the dominance of this elusive, so-called ‘amoral’ director could be felt through each twists & turns. The fuzzy shots of the fictional film-maker’s profile, the tragic and bizarre details saturating his works are meticulously provided to digital-age readers in a form they are very familiar with. But, it’s important to note that Marsha Pessl isn’t using the tricky conventions to make thick commentary on pop-culture. It’s just a device to support the labyrinthine plot machinations of the 600 page novel.

Author Marsha Pessl

Although the legend of Cordova is diffused throughout the story, the protagonist is a disgraced investigative reporter Scott McGrath. The novel opens at a night in 2011 with Scott jogging around the reservoir in Central Park, New York. He spots a ghost-like young woman in a red coat. She literally moves in mysterious ways and when he tries to catch up with her, she figuratively evaporates. Few days later, Scott learns that Cordova’s only daughter, Ashley has committed suicide by jumping from top floor of vacant, dilapidated warehouse in Chinatown. A little investigation showers a fact upon McGrath: he was one of the last people to see her (the woman in redcoat). Five years back, while working on an investigative story on Cordova, Scott McGrath got a tip from an anonymous caller. The tip suggested that Cordova was abusing children, safely tucked under his heavily fortified 300-acre property (‘there’s something he does to the children’, eerily whispers the caller). Later, Scott, who had just been blessed with fatherhood, uncharacteristically slanders Cordova in an interview. He is immediately sued (agrees to $250,000 settlement) and the anonymous caller couldn’t be tracked down. Scott’s wife Cynthia leaves him and now his 5 year old daughter Samantha visits him over alternate weekends. After hearing about Ashley’s death, Scott once again becomes obsessed with Cordova. In an effort to gain back his journalistic reputation and personal finances, Scott dives headlong into the creepy, sinister universe of the madcap artistic genius.

The plot is very linear and thrillingly moves between bleak underground atmospheres of S&M night club, unnerving mansion, insane asylum, etc. The prospect of black magic curse, ghosts, haunted dolls, and Satan even though extends a bit into preposterous territory, nonetheless offers a solidly entertaining, page-turning reading experience. Pessl’s prose is littered with spellbinding flourishes, providing all the necessary words to get lost inside Scott’s perspective. But after 400 plus pages (especially from that very long, wildly adventurous chapter), I stopped taking the story seriously and prepared myself for the sequence of twists, which of course is marred by lack of psychological and narrative credibility. Marsha Pessl keeps the thrill of the chase up until the last, chilly revelations of the novel. But the supposedly ambiguous destination we reach after the extended fall down the rabbit hole isn’t as gratifying or tantalizing as I expected. The promise of a high-brow literary thriller, felt in the early set-up of the narrative, isn’t fully realized by the rhetorical ending.

Perhaps, the ineradicable flaw in Night Film, which renders it forgettable in the long-run, is its perfunctory characterization. Most of the characters, populating the novel, are written in to provide the crucial details. They mostly remain as plot-forwarding devices. Moreover, Scott’s increasingly foolhardy nature makes it difficult for us to invest any real emotional feeling to his eventual predicament. Nevertheless, the greatest creation in the novel, as I mentioned earlier, is the mixture of myth and truth spun around the life of Cordova. The fictional director seems to be an impeccably fabricated amalgamation of fickle directorial geniuses like Stanley Kubrick, Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, Roman Polanski, John Cassavettes, Alejandro Jodorowsky, and David Lynch. But the single weakening factor of 'Cordova' story line concerns the plot details of the director’s works. While Pessl’s prose establishes Cordova as the maker of profoundly dark cinema, the general details of the plot appear to be cliched and silly. If Cordova’s temperament brings to mind those aforementioned geniuses, his story-line only brings to mind the works of Dario Argento and Mario Bava. Known as ‘Masters of Macabre’, these two film-makers’ projects would seem spectacular for horror fans, although it couldn’t be termed as deeply philosophical. These problems, though, mostly troubles you in retrospect. So you can thoroughly enjoy the mystery while reading it, and contemplate on its implausibilities & other weaknesses after the ending. It’s edgy, nightmarish but ultimately forgettable. 

Slaughterhouse-Five – A Uniquely Trenchant Commentary on Human Nature

"There are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces…"

Kurt Vonnegut, one of America’s popular and controversial novelists of the 20^th century, allows his wartime experiences to loosely form the base of his darkly humorous meta-fiction Slaughterhouse-Five (published in 1969). Sprawled little over 200 pages, this defiantly complex and deeply ironic novel unmask hardest truths about the human condition. And Vonnegut does so in the gentlest and humorous manner possible, with the prose that beams with pragmatism and subversion. Over the years, Slaughterhouse-Five is faced with the danger of being trivialized as an ‘anti-war’ novel. Vonnegut does take an anti-war stance, but not by faithfully reconstructing the elaborate history behind his limited war experiences. He rather points out to the monstrosity of war by observing the pointlessness of the entire experience from a disconnected vantage point. This disconnection allows the author to set forth and examine the existential angst, inevitability of death, and tragic farce known as ‘modern life’. 

Kurt Vonnegut served with the 106th Infantry Division of the US army during World War II. He was arrested in 1944 during the Battle of the Bulge and was later sent to Dresden to work in a factory that manufactured vitamins for pregnant woman. Vonnegut was in Dresden when the allied forces bombed the city in February 1945. His survival was followed with the repulsive task of exhuming thousands of corpses. The firebombing of Dresden served as the basis of his most celebrated novel, released nearly 25 years after the horrific historical event. As accounted in the opening chapter of Slaughterhouse-five, the demands of enunciating wartime experience nearly broke Mr. Vonnegut. What plagued the author is the inability to say anything comprehensible about such a horrific event (“there is nothing intelligent to tell about a massacre”, quips the novel’s omniscient narrator). In this prelude, Vonnegut converses with his war buddy Bernard O’Hare about his never-to-be published 5000 page book on Dresden. Hence the surreal story of Billy Pilgrim, the author’s alter-ego, is a means to liberate himself from the weight of hideous personal experiences.

Author Kurt Vonnegut [photo credit: Marty Reichenthal/AP/npr.org]

The absurdly funny tale of Billy begins with this popular phrase: “Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time”. The novel, which also came with an alternative title ‘The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death’, eschews conventional narrative or characterization and unfurls with deliberately fragmented vignettes. It has to do with the perspective of the protagonist, who after an accident uncontrollably travels through time to different phases of his own life. It's like passing through myriad of doors in a big mansion. He travels from being German prisoner-of-war to his lush post-war years as optometrist, then back to his aloof teenage years, and so on. The bizarre thing about Billy’s adventure through time is his encounter with the ‘Tralfamadorians’, a highly enhanced alien race for whom time is not linear. For these fourth-dimensional creatures, who exist in all times at once, death is nothing but a single moment as they are 'very well' in other moments. Their stoic defiance in comprehending death influences Billy Pilgrim, which is summed up through his notable, fatalistic phrase: “So it goes.” The phrase is repeatedly mentioned in the book, whenever a death is recorded. It’s like a slogan born out of acceptance of a situation whose control doesn’t rest upon us (humans), and also defiantly tries to dilute the power it (death) has over us. The most comical yet thought-provoking episode involves Billy being stuck in a glassed-in zoo on the Tralfamadorian world. He says he was confined there for months as an exhibit and forced to mate with a starlet named Montana Wildhack.

Throughout Billy’s incredible journeys, Vonnegut makes references to personal events and historical occurrences. Although, Vonnegut makes us visit Billy’s life, like the aliens observing life through non-chronological points in space, he gradually draws the fragmented spaces to actually diffuse through each event or space, highlighting every spatial or temporal moment as our relentless attempt to hold on to the world, in which our fates are out of control and there are no fixed shores to rest upon. Vonnegut’s novels aren’t simply make-believe tales, but superior tools to reflect upon the assortment of humanity’s darker side. However the American writer’s works are anything but didactic. He mostly hopes to make subtle, bemused comments on the big philosophical questions. While, Slaughterhouse-Five is concerned with the cycle of war and dehumanization (similar to Joseph Heller’s masterwork Catch-22), the prevalent theme in the novel discusses the dominating position of determinism (fate) over freewill in human life. At one point, the authorial voice says, “Among the things that Billy could not change are the past, the present, and the future.” Even though, Billy’s journey talks of predestination, the author nevertheless equates war and its inhumane mechanism with the absence of freewill.

A still from George Roy Hill's movie adaptation of the same name (released in 1972)

Kurt Vonnegut’s commentary on modern warfare doesn’t assign blame based on nationalities. Just like the novel doesn’t have a hero or a villain, the destructiveness of war doesn’t provide a comfortable position to judge. Subsequently, Billy Pilgrim got to be the classic anti-hero or non-hero character in literature. His ineptness and lack of valor reminds us of the authorial words in earliest chapter: “all wars are children's crusades, as all wars are fought by soldiers barely out of their teens, some of whom have never left home before they were called upon by their countries to kill and die. So it goes.” The positioning of Billy between the fissures of surreality and reality, further questions the utter pointlessness of war. By constantly foregrounding the absurdities of the otherwise commanding characters – like Howard W Campbell or Wild Bob or Rumfoord – Vonnegut silently condemns the deception of heroic figures, reeled in to encourage the war efforts. Altogether, Kurt Vonnegut’s stubbornly imaginative vision and corrosive wit in Slaughterhouse-Five speaks of our deepest, unspeakable fears and pains. It’s one of those timeless literary treasures that opens up fresher perspectives with each process of re-reading.