Once again, I’m entangled with the Criminal Element, this time with a review of Edgar-nominated war story The Sympathizer.
While it’s likely that the Vietnam War spawned many bookshelves full of novels written by Vietnamese authors, an awfully small number of these are in English. Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer is one of these, a mordant, discursive recounting of the South Vietnamese exile experience from the fall of Saigon to the early Reagan years.