The Sympathizer is a great book about the war and espionage, a cynical and funny tale of divided loyalties and identities, and the angry shout of a diaspora community reaching maturity and speaking back to the colonialist fantasies of The Quiet American and Apocalypse Now.

Our narrator is a man of perpetually divided loyalties. An aide-de-camp in the South Vietnamese Secret Police, he is also a North Vietnamese spy passing intelligence to his blood brother. As PAVN armored divisions surround Saigon, he is given one last mission by the Communists: Join the diaspora, infiltrate their resistance movement, report to Hanoi. He arranges a desperate and bloody escape from Saigon, and then settles into the strange twilight existence of the Vietnamese refugee, where generals become restaurant owners and paratroop heroes drink themselves to death.

Questions of identity and feeling are central to this book. The narrator was born out of place, the bastard Eurasian child of a French priest and a Vietnamese peasant. He earned a scholarship to Occidental college in Los Angeles, earning a Master's degree in American studies, along with CIA training in unconventional interrogations. He sympathizes with everybody, even as he is unable to save them, participates in their damnation. He serves as a creative consultant for a war movie where The Auteur does not permit Vietnamese characters a single line, and assassinates men for the wishes of a man who does not yet know the war is over. In the harrowing final quarter, the narrator returns to Vietnam in a desperate bid to save the life of one of two people he is loyal to, and finds himself up against the horror of the victorious revolution, and the nihilism of the reeducation camps.

This is a complex book, well-deserving of all it's awards. Come for the dark cynicism and espionage, stay to think about questions of who we all are, as Americans, as Vietnamese, as people with blood on our hands, and how inadequate sympathies are.