Afbeelding van de auteur.

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Auteur van De sympathisant

16+ Werken 5,740 Leden 237 Besprekingen Favoriet van 2 leden

Over de Auteur

Viet Thanh Nguyen was born in Ban Me Thuot, Viet Nam. In 1975, he came to the United States as a refugee with his family. He received degrees in English and ethnic studies from the University of California Berkeley. After receiving a Ph.D. in English from Berkeley, he began teaching at the toon meer University of Southern California and has been there ever since. He is an associate professor of English and American studies and ethnicity. He is the author of Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America and Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War. The novel The Sympathizer won the First Novel Prize from the Center for Fiction, the 2016 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature in Fiction, and the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. His latsest novel is The Refugees. He co-edited Transpacific Studies: Framing an Emerging Field with Janet Hoskins. (Bowker Author Biography) toon minder
Fotografie: Photo by Webb Chappell found at Narrative Magazine

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Werken van Viet Thanh Nguyen

De sympathisant (2015) 3,834 exemplaren
The Refugees (2017) 949 exemplaren
The Committed (2021) 440 exemplaren
The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives (2018) — Redacteur — 152 exemplaren
Chicken of the Sea (2019) 12 exemplaren
Ploughshares Summer 2019 Guest-edited by Viet Thanh Nguyen (2019) — Redacteur — 5 exemplaren
Vietnamees in Parijs (2022) 3 exemplaren
Simone (2024) 3 exemplaren
Refugiados 2 exemplaren
Nguyen Viet Thanh 1 exemplaar
L'idealista (2022) 1 exemplaar

Gerelateerde werken

It Occurs to Me That I Am America: New Stories and Art (2018) — Introductie — 71 exemplaren
Go Home! (2018) — Voorwoord — 54 exemplaren
One World Two: A Second Global Anthology of Short Stories (2016) — Medewerker — 18 exemplaren
How Do I Explain This to My Kids?: Parenting in the Age of Trump (2017) — Medewerker, sommige edities10 exemplaren

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In this book; Nguyen takes on the French. The book takes place in Paris; with gangsters, drug-dealers, etc, and at points a bit too violent for me. Overall, however, I liked it. Here's a favorite quote:

"that's what nobody tells you about the afterlife. It smells like rotten mean and putric water and black mold."
 
Gemarkeerd
banjo123 | 20 andere besprekingen | Mar 16, 2024 |
I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces. Perhaps not surprisingly, I am also a man of two minds.
p1

So begins the confession of an unnamed Captain, aide to a General who escaped Vietnam at the end of the war on the last plane to America as the communists rolled into Saigon. Was it the Vietnam war or the American war? It depends which country you come from. This duality plays a significant role in the book, someone who was a communist but played the part of the other side. A man who had a French father and a Vietnamese mother so never really fitted in and was constantly reminded that he was a bastard. As the story is told, duality is shown at every step of the way with 'passions running hot and food getting cold', innocence and guilt, the yin and yang of American politics - Black and White. White as a symbol of purity and innocence but also death and mourning.

. . . most of our fellow exiles had been shrunken by their experience, either absolutely through the aforementioned maladies of migration, or relatively, surrounded by Americans so tall they neither looked through or looked down on the newcomers. They simply looked over them.
p91

Imagine how tiring it must be to see both sides of everything but overall to hate your time in America and how you are treated, never able to let go of the old and completely embrace the new. The book was a searing inditement of Hollywood with Nguyen referring to it as the propaganda arm of the USA. Films about the war in Vietnam make the Americans look like the victors and seem to rewrite the history of that era when in fact America lost at great expense to the country.

Movies were America's way of softening up the rest of the world, Hollywood relentlessly assaulting the mental defenses of audiences with the hit, the smash, the spectacle, the blockbuster, and, yes, even the box office bomb.
p166

There is a section in the book where the Captain is called to be the adviser to a film that is being produced by someone known as the Auteur. I wondered if that was also what the narrator of the book was as well. In the film, the Vietnamese were overlooked, underpaid, given no speaking parts and generally unwanted. There is a rape scene in the film which the Captain knew was included but didn't see until he watched the whole film and it was as this point, if he didn't know it already, that his work with the film crew had been for nothing.

Not to own the means of production can lead to premature death, but not to own the means of representation is also a kind of death
p218

There then appears later in the book the rape of an agent that the Captain was forced to watch and which he had 'forgotten' about and not included in his confession. He did nothing to intervene and prevent it or stop it and this I think is meant to be symbolic of himself, the war and his country. You might be a double agent but what have you achieved?

In yoga we are constantly striving for the moment when 'duality ceases'. The moment when the pull of gravity can be experienced alongside the upward thrust of energy and you are at 'one' with it. And in the book, duality ceases after torture and torment when the Captain accepts himself and what he has done and at this point 'I' is used as a pronoun. Duality ceases.

At the end of the book they become 'boat people' but swear that they will live.

This is a challenging book that has to be read slowly to fully understand it. It attacks and defends identity, betrayal and loyalty in the context of war. And it is messy.
… (meer)
 
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allthegoodbooks | 150 andere besprekingen | Mar 4, 2024 |
A massive flood in Vietnam when mother was a small girl. A horrible wildfire in California now as she is a child. Scary stuff! Who is there to help in each disaster? And who will be there next time?
The illustrations by Minnie Phan are meaningful, imaginative, clear, and with the muted colors of pencil work.
Well suited for reading WITH someone of any age including ESL, and great for gifting to anyone, and especially to a school or teacher or your public library!
I requested and received a free temporary e-book on Adobe Digital Editions from Astra Books for Young Readers, Minerva via NetGalley. Thank you!
Available May 07, 2024
… (meer)
 
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jetangen4571 | 1 andere bespreking | Feb 10, 2024 |
Another excellent book by Viet Thanh Nguyen.

These short stories are beautifully written and masterfully crafted. This is my second experience with Viet Thanh Nguyen's writing and it did not disappoint. Great glimpses into the lives of Vietnamese post-war refugees.
 
Gemarkeerd
bschweiger | 48 andere besprekingen | Feb 4, 2024 |

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Statistieken

Werken
16
Ook door
7
Leden
5,740
Populariteit
#4,296
Waardering
3.9
Besprekingen
237
ISBNs
113
Talen
16
Favoriet
2

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