Being the child of a Vietnamese mother and a French-Catholic priest, he wears the “bastard” tag himself: he belongs nowhere. Our country was cursed, bastardized, partitioned into north and south, the narrator tells us. In its use of a protagonist who is buffeted around by circumstances, and who can be seen as representing a nation’s turbulent history, this book is reminiscent of such modern classics as Gunter Grass’s The Tin Drum and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. As we travel through the tortured landscape of his mind, his dual-sidedness will also be revealed as a metaphor for his war-torn country, Vietnam. The theme of two-facedness will run through this book: near the end, it will find an echo in a tragically grotesque image – a two-headed baby, a victim of a chemical experiment, preserved in formaldehyde – that could come from a horror movie about mutants, but could just as easily be the narrator’s view of himself in a distorting mirror. I am simply able to see any issue from both sides.” “I am not some misunderstood mutant from a comic book or a horror movie, although some have treated me as such. I am a man of two faces, and also a man of two minds, the narrator-protagonist of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Sympathizer says in the novel’s opening paragraph.
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