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Nguyen’s first novel starts with the 1975 collapse of Saigon and follows a group of upper-echelon Vietnamese on one of the last helicopter flights out. The General, his family, and the Captain, who narrates this account, wind up in California. While the General opens a liquor store and then a restaurant, the Captain maintains a vigorous second life as a spy, reporting to the Communists back home. Sometimes humorous, often angry, this explosive narrative investigates questions of divided loyalties, exploring what it means when the personal and the political clash.
Founded by Carla Cohen and Barbara Meade in 1984, Politics \u0026 Prose Bookstore is Washington, D.C.’s premier independent bookstore and cultural hub, a gathering place for people interested in reading and discussing books. Politics \u0026 Prose offers superior service, unusual book choices, and a haven for book lovers in the store and online. Visit them on the web at http://www.politics-prose.com/
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The Sympathizer Chapter 5 Summary & Analysis – LitCharts
The narrator committed his first “unnatural act” at thirteen when he masturbated into a squ that his mother was preparing for dinner. After …
Source: www.litcharts.com
Date Published: 10/9/2022
View: 8140
The Rape of The Squid: Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer
Expecting to be chastised for masturbating with a squ, the protagonist defends himself: his deed in no way equals the obscenity of murder and …
Source: hephzibahgrace.com
Date Published: 8/30/2022
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Squid and Prejudice – Viet Thanh Nguyen
Zahir J.: Viet Thanh Nguyen is the author of The Sympathizer, which won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize. His non-fiction book, Nothing Ever Dies, was …
Source: vietnguyen.info
Date Published: 12/27/2022
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The Sympathizer – Yennie Jun
For example, the infamous squ masturbation scene is a bit obscene and funny and slightly uncomfortable, until he hits the punch with, this is nothing.
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Date Published: 2/20/2021
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The First Time – TASTE Cooking
A young boy’s sensual escapade with a squ is reflected upon in the … Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer won the Pulitzer Prize …
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Date Published: 8/15/2022
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the sympathizer, viet thanh nguyen. every woman in this novel …
I had to read this book for a in college! So many disturbing scenes. There’s one scene where the narrator uses a dead squ to …
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Date Published: 3/30/2022
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The sympathizer – Viet Thanh Nguyen · refactored happiness
Masturbation, even with an admittedly nonconsensual squ? Not so much. It’s a very powerful technique. If you keep reading about people …
Source: naelvis.github.io
Date Published: 4/8/2021
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주제에 대한 기사 평가 the sympathizer squid
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- Date Published: 2015. 5. 21.
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Who is Linh in The Sympathizer?
The wife of Bon and the mother of Duc. She has a round face, “mottled and cratered” with acne scars, reminding one of a harvest moon. She dies, along with Duc, during a missile attack on the airport when she, Man, and Duc try to escape from South Vietnam after the fall of Saigon.
Is The Sympathizer pro Communist?
Set as the flashback in a coerced confession of a political prisoner, the book tells the story of the South Vietnamese Government in 1975 and subsequent events in American exile in Los Angeles, through the eyes of a half-Vietnamese, half-French undercover communist agent.
Who is sunny in The Sympathizer?
One of the narrator’s friends from college who got his Anglophone nickname in 1969. Sonny was a scholarship student at a college in Orange County, California, where he studied journalism.
What is The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen about?
A profound, startling, and beautifully crafted debut novel, The Sympathizer is the story of a man of two minds, someone whose political beliefs clash with his individual loyalties. It is April 1975, and Saigon is in chaos.
Who is the Crapulent major in The Sympathizer?
A fat bon vivant who enjoys good food and drink, particularly the Chinese restaurants in Cholon—this is why the narrator refers to him as “crapulent,” meaning over-indulgent in drinking and eating.
Who is Ms Mori in The Sympathizer?
Sofia Mori Character Analysis. The secretary of the Department of Oriental Studies at Occidental College, where the narrator works as a clerk. She is forty-six years old and was born in Gardena, California.
What does nothing mean in The Sympathizer?
The “nothing” here refers to the opposite of collectivism, which is individualism, and that is the answer to the question what is more precious than freedom and independence.
Is Vietnam a Communist?
Vietnam is a socialist republic with a one-party system led by the Communist Party. The CPV espouses Marxism–Leninism and Hồ Chí Minh Thought, the ideologies of the late Hồ Chí Minh. The two ideologies serve as guidance for the activities of the party and state.
What is the confession in The Sympathizer?
His novel, “The Sympathizer,” is set during and just after the war in Vietnam and is told in the form of a forced confession written by a spy for the North Vietnamese who worked undercover as an aid to a South Vietnamese general. It appears that part of his crime is sympathizing with the suffering on both sides.
Who dies in The Sympathizer?
The narrator’s father dies in 1968, soon after the narrator returns to Vietnam from California. He is shot in the head while listening to his assassin’s confession at his church. Get the entire The Sympathizer LitChart as a printable PDF.
Who is Claude in the committed?
The General’s most trusted friend and a friend and mentor to the narrator, though Claude is unaware of the narrator’s Communist sympathies. Claude reveals to the narrator that he is one-sixteenth black. They meet when Claude finds the nineteen-year-old narrator on a refugee barge in 1954.
How many books has Viet Thanh Nguyen written?
What happens to Bon’s wife and child as they are evacuating Vietnam?
Bon’s wife and child are killed before their plane takes off, giving him two more deaths to avenge.
Do you need to read The Sympathizer before The Committed?
History really comes at these men. You’ll remember them, if you read “The Sympathizer,” but if you haven’t it’s not necessary; Nguyen neatly brings you up to speed. The first 100 pages of “The Committed” are, to my mind, better than anything in the first novel. The narrator’s voice snaps you up.
What is a Communist sympathizer?
The Communist sympathizer, who is a potential communist, because he or she holds Communist political views. The fellow traveler, who is someone who is sympathetic to Communism, but is neither an influential advocate of Communism, nor a potential Communist.
Who is the narrator a spy for in The Sympathizer?
The Narrator – The unnamed narrator of the novel. He is the son of a white French Priest and a Vietnamese woman. The Narrator became a member of the Communist revolutionaries while in school, and at the beginning of the novel he is working as a spy for the Communist Forces.
What is the confession in The Sympathizer?
His novel, “The Sympathizer,” is set during and just after the war in Vietnam and is told in the form of a forced confession written by a spy for the North Vietnamese who worked undercover as an aid to a South Vietnamese general. It appears that part of his crime is sympathizing with the suffering on both sides.
Who dies in The Sympathizer?
The narrator’s father dies in 1968, soon after the narrator returns to Vietnam from California. He is shot in the head while listening to his assassin’s confession at his church. Get the entire The Sympathizer LitChart as a printable PDF.
Who is Claude in the committed?
The General’s most trusted friend and a friend and mentor to the narrator, though Claude is unaware of the narrator’s Communist sympathies. Claude reveals to the narrator that he is one-sixteenth black. They meet when Claude finds the nineteen-year-old narrator on a refugee barge in 1954.
The Sympathizer: Chapter 5 Summary & Analysis
Under Sofia ’s tutelage, the narrator learns that “true revolution also [involves] sexual liberation.” The only thing that could make the narrator happier is if Bon were to get a companion. Shy and discreet about sex due to his Catholic upbringing, he abstains from everything but masturbation. On the other hand, the narrator has made peace with the idea of going to hell. The narrator committed his first “unnatural act” at thirteen when he masturbated into a squid that his mother was preparing for dinner. After ejaculating into it, he feels guilty. They had only six squid; his mother would notice the missing one. He rinses away the evidence, then cuts shallow scars into it. His mother returns to their hut. She stuffs the squid with ground pork, bean thread noodle, diced mushroom, and chopped ginger, then fries them and serves them with ginger-lime dipping sauce. Obediently, he eats and tastes his own salty flavor.
The Rape of The Squid: Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer
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“I took myself far off from my own presence, far indeed, and made myself an object. What else could it mean for me but an amputation, an excision, a hemorrhage that spattered my body with black blood? But I did not want this revision, this thematization. All I wanted was to be a man amongst other men. I wanted to come lithe and young into a world and build it together.”– Frantz Fanon, “The Fact of Blackness”, Black Skin, White Masks
Seething with unconcealed rage, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer is an all-out, uncensored retaliation against the Vietnam war and all its fallout. With prose so hard-boiled, its narrative almost serves as but a vessel for its scathing, multi-tiered post-colonial commentary, its characters embodying various tenets of the Vietnam war and post-colonial discourse.
The protagonist, a half-French, half-Vietnamese sleeper (communist spy) is a bastard. Rejected by his fellow countrymen, yet not European/American enough for his host country, he fits in nowhere. Nameless and faceless, he represents the hapless Orient with a twist- he is subversive through and through; “a man of two faces”. His is a divided, mosaic identity. A mixed-breed denied a rung in the hierarchies of race and class, I venture to suggest that he is communist because it is only in this method of organization can he find his place. Not as a “Vietnamese”, “French”, or “American”, but as a unit in a system alleging equality.
There are multiple references to Vietnam as a woman, as feminine, and to America, or the West, as male. The allusions to rape gets increasingly clearer, culminating in the protagonist’s actual raping of a squid.
If this book had chapter titles, I would have loved to see this section titled “The Rape of the Squid”– in allusion to Pope’s Rape of the Lock: it is a scene in which its blown-out-of-proportion literal grotesqueness overshadows its excusable immorality.
Expecting to be chastised for masturbating with a squid, the protagonist defends himself: his deed in no way equals the obscenity of murder and torture. This parallel is, of course, by no means coincidental. Rape- an uninvited, often violent, traumatic invasion- encapsulates Nguyen’s unflinching critique of the Vietnam war. The unbidden war not only cost an incredible number of lives, America’s involvement was (at that time) seen as something Vietnam “needed”: placing the blame on the victim is a game often played in rape.
The other key tenet of representation is explored with the meta fictional making of a movie. Orientalism’s creation of the oriental cannot get any more obvious with the Auteur’s creation of The Hamlet. He creates- literally- the orient, catering to occidental tastes, fantasies and imaginings.
Edward Said writes, “Orientalism [is] a Wastern style for dominating, restructuring and having authority over the Orient… as a sign of European-Atlantic power over the Orient than it is a veritable discourse about the Orient… a system of knowledge about the Orient, an accepted grid for filtering the Orient into Western Consciousness.” (Said, Introduction to Orientalism).
The movie plays out dramatically Said’s words: The Auteur conveniently replaces Vietnamese with Filipinos- both are basically the same. Filtered through typical Occidental attitudes, the Asians, stripped of their unique customs, language and beliefs, are an all-in-one Oriental face to him. (Indeed, the protagonist’s American counterparts do not care that he is Eurasian, an important distinction to him- all Orientals are one and the same.) The protagonist has to fight for the Asian characters to be given a voice as they are rendered voiceless background props in a movie about them. This re-creation of an Oriental scene is titled, metaphorically and physically, with an Occidentalist label: “The Hamlet”- the complexities of the East must be packaged palatably for Western consumption.
The only “Orient” given a ‘proper’ role- as an interrogated, tortured Viet Cong- attains this distinction at a price. To achieve “fame” in the Western media, he lets himself get spat on, beaten, covered in vomit and blood and strapped to a wooden board. He wins Western audiences’ recognition at the loss of his dignity. Nguyen’s introduction of this pathetic, infuriating character suggests his own anger, pity and admiration at the lengths the fawning Orient would go to get a pat on the head by his Western counterparts.
It is easy to read an objective account of the Vietnam war. It is easy to discuss post-colonialism in a humanities class with the vigour of students many times removed from the tyranny of colonialism.
Reading The Sympathizer was difficult. Laced with barbwire anger, written decades after the events it describes, this narrative is a wake-up call to its readers. Colonialism has fallen, but its pillars still stand.
Orientalism, the tendency to recreate people groups in order to dominate and control them, has branched out from tyrannising only Eastern groups since Said’s time. It is carried out again and again by anyone attempting to justify their actions against another- labelling such victims as ‘violent’, ‘dangerous’, ‘ignorant’, ‘lost’, ‘dumb’, ‘stupid’, ‘extremist’– and therefore deny them rights and a voice. The Vietnam war is but one overt, bloody example of these everyday occurrences. Acclaimed as the book is for its unique take on a famous historical event, it perhaps is so well received also because of how it resonates with the here and now. With our contemporary issues.
The sharp-edged style of prose may be a stumbling block, but this book is a necessary read, especially for people in our generation.
If you would like to purchase and read this book, you can do so here.
If you have enjoyed reading this post, do check out my post on Everything I Never Told Youfor another dose of post-colonial critique. If you prefer a change of scenery, my critique on The Secret Historytakes you back in time to the Classics and unravels the implications of Ancient Greek Dionysian madness.
Squid and Prejudice
RS interviews Pulitzer Prize winning author and USC professor Viet Thanh Nguyen about his new short story collection, what it was like working at his parents’ Vietnamese grocery store, and why he doesn’t write for white readers.
Produced by Juan Ramirez. Music by AF the Naysayer and Blue Dot Sessions. Additional music by Mobb Deep.
Finishing this book, I am struck by Nguyen’s mastery with language, plot, character development, and storytelling.
Nguyen has such mastery with prose and I underlined so many passages just because the prose was so beautiful or creative. His vocabulary is immense and he utilizes words and phrases in such familiar and surprising ways that are so beautiful, profound, expressive, and poetic. Also I just found his tone and language so funny. I found the humor dark and filled with irony. For example, the infamous squid masturbation scene is a bit obscene and funny and slightly uncomfortable, until he hits the punch with, this is nothing. War is horrible, people dying is horrible, but masturbation is nothing. And this really makes the reader reconsider their previous conceptions of what is disturbing and why certain things disturb us and certain things do not….
“Some will undoubtedly find this episode obscene. Not I! Massacre is obscene. Torture is obscene. Three million dead is obscene. Masturbation, even with an admittedly nonconsensual squid? Not so much. I, for one, am a person who believes that the world would be a better place if the word ‘murder’ made us mumble as much as the word ‘masturbation.'”
In terms of the ending, where Man turns out to be the one keeping the narrator captive, I was reminded of the endings of two dystopian novels: Winston’s “reeducation” by O’Brien in 1984, and John’s meeting with Mustapha Mond at the end of Brave New World.
As an Asian American, the many symbolisms he evokes related to two-selves, half-selves, mixed-selves really resonated with me: that of being not wholly one, of being split in more than one way (Oriental vs. Occident, mother vs. father, Vietnam vs. America, Communism vs. capitalism). At the end there is a literal split between his selves as he starts to refer to himself as “we”.
Linh Character Analysis
The wife of Bon and the mother of Duc . She has a round face, “mottled and cratered” with acne scars, reminding one of a harvest moon. She dies, along with Duc, during a missile attack on the airport when she, Man , and Duc try to escape from South Vietnam after the fall of Saigon.
The Sympathizer
2015 novel by Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Sympathizer is the 2015 debut novel by Vietnamese-American professor Viet Thanh Nguyen. It is a best-selling novel[4] and recipient of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The novel received generally positive acclaim from critics,[5] and it was named a New York Times Editor’s Choice.[6]
The novel incorporates elements from a number of different novel genres: immigrant, mystery, political, metafiction,[7] dark comedic,[8] historical, spy, and war.[9] The story depicts the anonymous narrator, a North Vietnamese mole in the South Vietnamese army, who stays embedded in a South Vietnamese community in exile in the United States. While in the United States, the narrator describes being an expatriate and a cultural advisor on the filming of an American film, closely resembling Platoon and Apocalypse Now, before returning to Vietnam as part of a guerrilla raid against the communists.
The dual identity of the narrator, as a mole and immigrant, and the Americanization of the Vietnam War in international literature are central themes in the novel. The novel was published 40 years to the month after the fall of Saigon, which is the initial scene of the book.[10]
A sequel, titled The Committed, was published on March 2, 2021.[11]
Plot [ edit ]
Set as the flashback in a coerced confession of a political prisoner, the book tells the story of the South Vietnamese Government in 1975 and subsequent events in American exile in Los Angeles, through the eyes of a half-Vietnamese, half-French undercover communist agent.[12] The spy remains unnamed throughout the novel from the fall of Saigon, to refugee camps and relocation in Los Angeles, to his time as a film consultant in the Philippines, and finally to his return and subsequent imprisonment in Vietnam.
The narrator lives in a series of dualities, at times contradictions: he is of mixed blood descent (Vietnamese mother, and French Catholic priest father), raised in Vietnam but attended college in the U.S., and a North Vietnamese mole yet a friend to South Vietnamese military officials and soldiers and a United States CIA agent. During the imminent fall of Saigon, he, as an aide-de-camp, arranges for a last minute flight as part of Operation Frequent Wind, to secure the safety of himself, his best friend Bon, and the General he advises. While they are being evacuated, the group is fired upon while boarding; during the escape, Bon’s wife and child are killed along with many others.
In Los Angeles, the General and his former officers weaken quickly, disillusioned by a foreign culture and their rapid decline in status. The General attempts to reclaim some semblance of honor by opening his own business, a liquor store. The continuous emasculation and dehumanization within American society prompts the General to draft plans for assembling an army of South Vietnamese expatriates to return as rebels to Vietnam. While participating in the expatriate unit, the narrator takes a clerical position at Occidental College, begins having an affair with Ms. Mori, his Japanese-American colleague, and then the General’s eldest daughter, Lana. While living in the United States, the narrator sends letters in invisible ink to Man, a North Vietnamese revolutionary and handler, providing intelligence about the General’s attempts at raising a commando army.
When he receives an offer to consult for a Hollywood film on the Vietnam War called The Hamlet, he sees it as an opportunity to show multiple sides of the War and to give the Vietnamese a voice in its historical portrayal. However, working on set in the Philippines, he not only fails to complicate the misleading, romantically American representation of the war, but almost dies when explosives detonate long before they should. There is skepticism as to whether the explosion was a mistake since the director greatly dislikes the narrator.
After he recovers, against Man’s insistence that he stay in the U.S. and continue his work as a mole, the narrator decides to accompany the exiled troops back into Vietnam. Before he returns, he executes a left-leaning Vietnamese newspaper editor, “Sonny”, who he learns had an affair with Ms. Mori while the narrator was in the Philippines. During his mission in Vietnam, he manages to barely save Bon’s life. However, it is to no heroic avail as they are captured and imprisoned.
The encampment is where the protagonist writes his confession, a plea for absolution addressed to the commandant who is directed by the commissar. However, rather than writing what his communist comrades wish to hear, the protagonist writes a complex and nuanced reflection of the events that have led him to his imprisonment. He refuses to show only one side, he leaves nothing out (even his painful memories of a childhood without a father or of his first experience masturbating), and he sympathizes with the many perspectives of a complicated conflict that has divided a nation. While he still considers himself a communist and revolutionary, he acknowledges his friendships with those who are supposedly his enemy and he understands all soldiers as honorably fighting for their home. When his confession drafts are rejected, he is finally brought before the commissar.
The commissar, the man with no face, turns out to be his direct superior Man. Yet, this does not stop Man from subjecting him to torture as part of his reeducation. First, he must admit his crime of being complicit in the torturing and raping of a female communist agent. Then he must realize that he took part, albeit unconsciously, in the murder of his father. Lastly, he must learn Man’s final lesson that a revolution fought for independence and freedom could make those things worth less than nothing, that nothingness itself was more precious than independence and freedom. The novel ends with the narrator among a crowd of boat people at sea.
Style [ edit ]
Almost every review comments on the most distinctive stylistic feature: the anonymous narrator who provides continuous commentary. The narrator has an “acrobatic ability” that guides the reader through the contradictions of the war and American identity.[8] The first person narration derives from the frame context for the book: a confession by the narrator to communist captors trying to make him account for his exile.[9] The communist captors force him to write and rewrite the narrative, in an attempt to correct his ideological lens on America and the South Vietnamese enemies.[9]
Many critiques compare the narrator’s style to other authors, typically American authors. Randy Boyagoda, writing for The Guardian, describes the initial passage of the novel as a “showy riff on Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man”.[7] For Boyagoda, the anonymity and doubled life reflection of the narrator closely parallel the African American narrator of Invisible Man’s commentary from the perspective of concealment.[7] Ron Charles describes the narrative voice as close to both “Roth-inspired comic scene[s] of self-abuse” and “gorgeous Whitmanian catalogue of suffering”.[9]
Themes [ edit ]
Most reviews of the novel describe it as a literary response to the typically American-centric worldview of works like Apocalypse Now and Platoon. In particular, the section of the novel where the narrator advises on The Hamlet helps critically examine this worldview. Ron Charles describes this section as “As funny as it is tragic”, able to “carry the whole novel”.[9] The New York Times’ book review describes the war as a “literary war”, and says that Nguyen’s The Sympathizer is “giving voice to the previously voiceless [Vietnamese perspective] while it compels the rest of us to look at the events of 40 years ago in a new light”.[8] In part, the novel is a response to Nguyen’s own admiration of, but difficult relationship with, works like Platoon, Apocalypse Now, and Rambo and the slaughter of Vietnamese in the films.[10]
The narrator’s duality of caste, education, and loyalties drive much of the novels’ activities. At first this duality is the strength of the novel’s narrator, providing deft critique and investigation into the contradictions of social situations, but eventually, in the last, this duality “becomes an absurdist tour de force that might have been written by a Kafka or Genet”.[8]
Television adaptation [ edit ]
In April 2021, A24 and Rhombus Media acquired the rights to the novel to adapt it into a television series.[13] In July 2021, it was announced that HBO had given the production a series order. The series will be produced by A24 with Robert Downey Jr. as co-star and executive producer, Park Chan-wook as director and Don McKellar as co-showrunner.[14]
Reception [ edit ]
The New York Times Book Review praised the novel for its place in the broader Vietnam War literature, and for its treatment of dualities in a way that “compares favorably with masters like Conrad, Greene and le Carré”.[8] Writing for The Washington Post, Ron Charles called the novel “surely a new classic of war fiction” which is “startlingly insightful and perilously candid”.[9] For Charles, it is less the particulars of the thematic explosion of the response to the Vietnam war that makes the novel relevant, but rather how “Nguyen plumbs the loneliness of human life, the costs of fraternity and the tragic limits of our sympathy”.[9] Randy Boyagoda, writing for The Guardian, describes it as a “bold, artful and globally minded reimagining of the Vietnam war and its interwoven private and public legacies”.[7] A Vietnamese reviewer noted that, finally, Americans have a chance to gain a new perspective on the war, one that is in contrast to the one provided by Hollywood myth-makers.[15]
The main critique from reviewers is, at times, the overwritten description in the novel.[16] Though generally supportive of the novel, Boyagoda describes this overwriting: “the Captain’s grandstanding against east/west stereotypes and against the putative ills of the US and Catholicism clogs his monologue because it does little more than advance an equally hackneyed set of complaints and rebuttals. Nguyen’s own academic background also seeps in, inspiring didactic language.”[7]
Awards [ edit ]
See also [ edit ]
Son Do (“Sonny”) Character Analysis
One of the narrator ’s friends from college who got his Anglophone nickname in 1969. Sonny was a scholarship student at a college in Orange County, California, where he studied journalism. Sonny left Vietnam, promising his parents that he would liberate the country from the United States. He once reported for an Orange County newspaper and lived in a town called Westminster. He edits a newspaper that serves the Vietnamese community. Moved by the refugee plight, he started the newspaper, which is the first to print news in Vietnamese. He is a “naked leftist” who thinks that he’s always right, and is always eager to address an opponent’s inconsistencies. Depending on one’s perspective, he was either self-confident or arrogant during his school days. His grandfather was a mandarin, or a traditionalist elder, who loathed the French. He became so politically inflammatory that the colonizers sent him “on a one-way berth to Tahiti,” where he supposedly befriended the painter Paul Gauguin, then died either of dengue fever or “an incurable strain of virulent homesickness.” As a student, Sonny led the antiwar faction of Vietnamese foreign students, which assembled each month in the student union or in someone’s apartment. Sonny later becomes involved with the narrator’s former lover, Sofia Mori . Concerned about the impact of some of his reporting, the General orders the narrator to kill Sonny. The narrator goes to Sonny’s apartment and fatally shoots him five times.
The First Time
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A young boy’s sensual escapade with a squid is reflected upon in the context of adult experience.
Ever since my fevered adolescence I had enjoyed myself with athletic diligence, using the same hand with which I crossed myself in mock prayer. This seed of sexual rebellion one day matured into my political revolution, disregarding all my father’s sermons about how onanism inevitably led to blindness, hairy palms, and impotence (he forgot to mention subversion). If I was going to Hell, so be it!
Having made my peace with sinning against myself, sometimes on an hourly basis, it was only due time before I sinned with others. So it was that I committed my first unnatural act at thirteen with a gutted squid purloined from my mother’s kitchen, where it awaited its proper fate along with its companions. Oh, you poor, innocent, mute squid! You were the length of my hand, and when stripped of head, tentacles, and guts possessed the comely shape of a condom, not that I knew what that was then.
Inside, you had the smooth, viscous consistency of what I imagined to be a vagina, not that I had ever seen such a marvelous thing besides those exhibited by the toddlers and infants wandering around totally naked or naked from the waist down in my town’s lanes and yards. This sight scandalized our French overlords, who saw this childhood nudity as evidence of our barbarism, which then justified their raping, pillaging, and looting, all sanctioned in the holy name of getting our children to wear some clothes so they would not be so tempting to decent Christians whose spirit and flesh were both in question. But I digress!
Back to you, soon-to-be-ravished squid: when I poked my index and then middle finger inside your tight orifice, just out of curiosity, the suction was such that my restless imagination could not help but make the connection with the verboten female body part that had obsessed me for the past few months. Without bidding, and utterly beyond my control, my maniacal manhood leaped to attention, luring me forward to you, inviting, bewitching, come-hither squid! Although my mother would return soon from her errand, and while at any moment a neighbor might have walked by the lean-to of our kitchen and caught me with my cephalopodic bride, I nevertheless dropped my trousers.
Hypnotized by my squid’s call and my erection’s response, I inserted the latter into the former, which was, unfortunately, a perfect fit. Unfortunate because from then onward no squid was safe from me, not to say that this diluted form of bestiality—after all, hapless squid, you were dead, though I now see how that raises other moral questions—not to say this transgression occurred often, since squid was a rare treat in our landlocked town. My father had given my mother the squid as a gift, as he himself ate well. Priests always had much attention lavished on them by their starstruck fans, those devout housewives and wealthy congregants who treated them as if they were guardians of the velvet rope blocking entrance into that ever so exclusive nightclub, Heaven. These fans invited them to dinner, cleaned their chambers, cooked their food, and bribed them with gifts of various kinds, including delectable, expensive seafood not meant for the likes of a poor woman like my mother.
While I felt no shame at all for my shuddering ejaculation, an enormous burden of guilt fell on me as soon as my senses returned, not because of any moral violation, but because I could hardly bear depriving my mother of even a morsel of squid.
We had only a half dozen, and she would notice one missing. What to do? What to do? A plan instantly came to my devious mind as I stood with the befuddled, deflowered squid in hand, my blasphemy leaking from its molested vulva. First, rinse the evidence of crime from the inert, abused squid. Second, cut shallow scars onto the skin to identify the victim squid. Then wait for dinner.
My innocent mother returned to our miserable hut, stuffed the squid with ground pork, bean thread noodle, diced mushroom, and chopped ginger, then fried and served them with a ginger-lime dipping sauce. There on the plate reclined my beloved, forlorn odalisque, marked by my hand, and when my mother said to help myself I seized it instantly with my chopsticks to forestall any chance of my mother doing so. I paused, my mother’s expectant, loving eyes upon me, and then I dipped the squid into the ginger-lime sauce and took the first bite. Well? she said. De-de-delicious, I stammered. Good, but you should chew it rather than swallow it whole, son. Take your time. It will taste better that way. Yes, Mama, I said. And, bravely smiling, this obedient son slowly chewed and savored the rest of his defiled squid, its salty flavor mixed with his mother’s sweet love.
Some will undoubtedly find this episode obscene. Not I! Massacre is obscene. Torture is obscene. Three million dead is obscene. Masturbation, even with an admittedly nonconsensual squid? Not so much. I, for one, am a person who believes that the world would be a better place if the word “murder” made us mumble as much as the word “masturbation.”
This story was published in TASTE’s Spring 2017 Fiction Issue. More stories from the issue can be found here.
The First Time was excerpted from THE SYMPATHIZER © 2015 by Viet Thanh Nguyen winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction; reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Grove Press, an imprint of Grove Atlantic, Inc. All rights reserved.
Viet Thanh Nguyen · refactored happiness
The sympathizer – Viet Thanh Nguyen
So I really liked the book all the way through and then found the ending quite disappointing under essentially every point of view. A lot like 1984, but I have already read 1984.
Let’s focus on the good parts. It’s a really funny and weird book, touching deep topics with sarcastic or surreal tones. The narrator gets lost in his own train of thoughts and memories and then gets brutally back to reality. This results in lines such as the following:
Massacre is obscene. Three million dead is obscene. Masturbation, even with an admittedly nonconsensual squid? Not so much.
It’s a very powerful technique. If you keep reading about people dying horrible deaths it doesn’t seem like a big deal after a while. You need to zoom out and zoom in again to realize what is being described; better yet, talk about something completely different and abruptly move the focus back on the deaths, like it’s happening here. It works.
I’m now going through the bookmarks and highlighted parts of the book. I’ll report here the narrator’s five principles in talking to a woman, for future reference:
My first three principles in talking to a woman: do not ask permission; do not say hello; and do not let her speak first. […] Fourth principle: give a woman the chance to reject something else besides me. If she declined the cigarette, as any of our proper young women should, I had an excuse to take one myself, which gave me a few seconds to say something while she focused on my cigarette. […] Principle five: statements, not questions, were less likely to lead to no.
I don’t know why, but before reading the book I though the author was a woman. I think this description could only (amusingly) be written by a man:
They were too much to bear, as was my guitar, displaying its full, reproachful hips on my bed as I left.
I mean, if you do think about it, the middle part of a guitar looks a bit like hips, but sexualizing a guitar as a woman lying on the bed – I guess it makes sense a posteriori, but how do you even get there. Anyways.
I highlighted a lot of parts in the book, because there were a ton of good, concise observation. I’ll list some, in no particular order:
The struggle that comes from losing one’s identity together with one’s role in society is well represented in one of the main characters’ arc:
What I’m saying, why I’m telling you all this, is that my life once had a meaning. It had a purpose. Now it has none. I was a son and a husband and a father and a soldier, and now I’m none of that. I’m not a man, and when a man isn’t a man he’s nobody.
The last sentence is per se nonsensical, and yet it tells so much. This kind of thinking explains many irrational actions.
Later in the book, “King Cong” made me chuckle;
More insighful paradoxes:
What am I dying for? he cried back. I’m dying because this world I’m living in isn’t worth dying for! If something is worth dying for, then you’ve got a reason to live.
The narrator’s drinking problem keeps popping up:
These questions required either Camus or cognac, and as Camus was not available I ordered cognac.
In short, I was in a familiar place, the place of feeling unfamiliar, which I responded to in my usual fashion by arming myself with a gin and tonic, my first of the evening.
Misc:
I had an abiding respect for the professionalism of career prostitutes, who wore their dishonesty more openly than lawyers, both of whom bill by the hour.
But I was also one of those unfortunate cases who could not help but wonder whether my need for American charity was due to my having first been the recipient of American aid.
Whatever people say about the General today, I can only testify that he was a sincere man who believed in everything he said, even if it was a lie, which makes him not so different from most.
This is also well written in more than one way:
키워드에 대한 정보 the sympathizer squid
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