NGUYEN, Viet Thanh. The Sympathizer. Norwalk, Connecticut: The Easton Press, 2016.

Octavo. Full red leather. Spine with raised bands, 22-carat gilt accents. All edges gilt. Moiré silk endpapers. Satin ribbon page marker. 371 pp. Signed Collector's Edition. Signed by the author on the special signature page. Includes signed Certificate of Authenticity, edition card, and bookplate adhered to front endpaper. Originally published New York: Grove Press, 2015.

Viet Thanh Nguyen (b. 1971) was born in Ban Mê Thuột, Vietnam, and came to the United States as a refugee in 1975, the year the novel begins. He grew up in San Jose, California, studied at Berkeley, and is now a professor of English and American Studies at the University of Southern California. The Sympathizer was his debut novel. It won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction — among seven other prizes, including the Edgar Award for Best First Novel, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize — and was named to more than twenty "best of year" lists. It is the first novel by a Vietnamese-American author to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

The narrator introduces himself in the novel's opening sentence as "a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces." He is a captain in the South Vietnamese army who is simultaneously a communist agent, reporting on the general and his inner circle to a handler in the North. When Saigon falls in April 1975, he follows the general and his entourage into exile in Los Angeles, continuing to observe and report on the exile community's activities while navigating the dislocations of refugee life in California. The novel is structured as a confession, written in a Vietnamese re-education camp after his eventual capture, and addressed to a "Commandant" whose identity becomes one of the novel's central revelations.

What Nguyen does with this premise is extraordinary. The narrator's condition — genuinely of two minds, genuinely committed to two irreconcilable positions, incapable of resolving his dual identity into a single coherent self — is simultaneously a spy thriller device and a sustained metaphor for the experience of the diaspora, the refugee, the person who belongs fully to neither the country they left nor the country they arrived in. The novel's treatment of the Vietnam War from a Vietnamese perspective — registering American cultural representations of the war, including a barely-disguised Apocalypse Now, with sardonic and precise intelligence — was immediately recognised as filling a gap in the literature of that conflict that had not previously been adequately addressed. The New York Times described it as "a remarkable debut novel" that "in its final chapters becomes an absurdist tour de force that might have been written by a Kafka or Genet." The Guardian called it "a bold, artful and globally minded reimagining of the Vietnam War." An HBO miniseries adaptation directed by Park Chan-wook, starring Robert Downey Jr. in multiple roles, brought the novel to a further audience.

Fine. Presenting as new.

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Catalogue Number: HH000521