The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author: Viet Thanh Nguyen
- Language: English
- Genre: Asian American Literature & Fiction
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
I AM A SPY, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces. Perhaps not surprisingly, I
am also a man of two minds. I am not some misunderstood mutant from a
comic book or a horror movie, although some have treated me as such. I am
simply able to see any issue from both sides. Sometimes I flatter myself that
this is a talent, and although it is admittedly one of a minor nature, it is
perhaps also the sole talent I possess.
At other times, when I reflect on how
I cannot help but observe the world in such a fashion, I wonder if what I
have should even be called talent. After all, a talent is something you use,
not something that uses you. The talent you cannot not use, the talent that
possesses you—that is a hazard, I must confess. But in the month when this
confession begins, my way of seeing the world still seemed more of a virtue
than a danger, which is how some dangers first appear.
The month in question was April, the cruelest month. It was the month in
which a war that had run on for a very long time would lose its limbs, as is
the way of wars. It was a month that meant everything to all the people in
our small part of the world and nothing to most people in the rest of the
world. It was a month that was both an end of a war and the beginning of . .
. well, “peace” is not the right word, is it, my dear Commandant? It was a
month when I awaited the end behind the walls of a villa where I had lived
for the previous five years, the villa’s walls glittering with broken brown
glass and crowned with rusted barbed wire.
I had my own room at the villa,
much like I have my own room in your camp, Commandant. Of course, the
proper term for my room is an “isolation cell,” and instead of a housekeeper
who comes to clean every day, you have provided me with a baby-faced
guard who does not clean at all. But I am not complaining. Privacy, not
cleanliness, is my only prerequisite for writing this confession.
While I had sufficient privacy in the General’s villa at night, I had little
during the day. I was the only one of the General’s officers to live in his
home, the sole bachelor on his staff and his most reliable aide. In the
mornings, before I chauffeured him the short distance to his office, we
would breakfast together, parsing dispatches at one end of the teak dining
table while his wife oversaw a well-disciplined quartet of children at the
other, ages eighteen, sixteen, fourteen, and twelve, with one seat empty for
the daughter studying in America.
Not everyone may have feared the end,
but the General sensibly did. A thin man of excellent posture, he was a
veteran campaigner whose many medals had been, in his case, genuinely
earned. Although he possessed but nine fingers and eight toes, having lost
three digits to bullets and shrapnel,
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