The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen

This narrator is very Hamlet-esque. He takes action all the time but there are also mad intricate thoughts behind everything. It’s as if he’s not savage enough to just bulldoze through situations like others seem to do. And he also literally double thinks everything because he’s a double agent during the Vietnam War. He’s a communist-socialist working among the anti-communist south. So all his moves actually support the revolution. He leaks information using invisible ink in his letters, he travels between Vietnam and the U.S. as needed, he kills if he has to. So, like Hamlet, he’ll follow through, but he also notices again and again that he’s kinda just a pawn a body a person–whatever that means. I loved the stuff about his mother the best. It was so pure and genuine amid so much chaos and despair. His memories of the way she reassured him even as others rejected him for being biracial or for being the son of a young woman who got pregnant by a predatory church guy. The way he honors