My Top 20 Books of 2021
I started becoming an almost compulsive reader about four years ago and since then, I’ve leafed through books thin and thick, factual and fictional, contemporary and classical, emulative and experimental. Finally, I think I have gotten to a certain point in where I am confident enough in my own tastes to recommend great books to other people especially those that wouldn’t already be on too many bestsellers’ lists and celebrity TBRs that everyone would have already heard of before. But before I can start this list off, I have to put forth a few disclaimers:
First, when I say “Top 20 Books of 2021” I don’t actually mean books released in 2021, because these are just the best books that I read in 2021. Sorry if you’re looking for newer books released this year but I usually don’t pay too much attention to new releases because I’ll usually just read whatever interests me.
Second, this list is not genre-specific. You will see both genre fiction as well as “genre-less” books and literary fiction. I have also included a small handful of manga and comics yeah, I consider those to be books too so if you have a problem with that then I guess it’s your loss. Oh, and there will also be a few non-fiction titles in here too, but his list will be mainly fiction.
Third, unfortunately I am not a big fan of Young Adult books because they’re just not my cup of tea so if you’re looking for things akin to Throne of Glass or Red, White and Royal Blue then I’m sorry but this might not be the list for you.
Alright, if you’re still here then I won’t belabor the nature of this list any longer, without further ado, here are my top 20:
The Back Of The Pack: #20–15
20. Perdido Street Station
Author: China Miéville
Genre: New Weird, Fantasy
Setting: Fictional city of New Crobuzon
I bought this after reading Miéville’s The City & The City last year, because as bizarre and out-of-this-world as that novel was, I felt that Miéville’s quirkiness was his biggest pull factor. Heralded by the literature intelligentsia as one of the icons of the “New Weird” literary movement, Miéville brings us to the dirty, dingy, steampunk world of New Crobuzon. With insectoid beings that make art by chewing and spitting out colored dyes, a bureaucratic devil who serves as an official ambassador of Hell and rainbow-colored caterpillars that can get high off on hallucinogenic drugs and metamorphize into monsters called slake-moths that feed off of people’s consciousnesses, Perdido Street Station’s strongest point is its worldbuilding.
The only problem with this book that lands it so far down on my list is that it might just be too weird. Miéville tries to cram in so many funky ideas into one book and what you end up with is a world that’s crowded with really awesome ideas, but these ideas ultimately don’t gel or come together to make a cohesive narrative. Definitely an interesting read though.
19. Ubik
Author: Phillip K. Dick
Genre: Science Fiction
Setting: Futuristic America and Space
If you’ve grown up in the 2000s and call yourself a fan of science fiction, you’ve probably seen a Phillip K. Dick story before. Blade Runner, Minority Report… his bibliography has been extensively adapted for cinema, so he’s pretty well-regarded as someone who knows what he’s doing when it comes to Sci-Fi. Ubik is set in a world where humanity has developed psychic abilities. Our protagonist Joe Chip, works for a company that employs psychic “bodyguards” with the power to counteract the psychic abilities of others. After some shenanigans, Joe and his associates find that the world around them seems to be moving backwards in time. One moment your using an Iphone, next thing you know your holding a rotary phone and everything around you is rapidly deteriorating into older versions of themselves. The only way to stop this is a mysterious substances known as Ubik and… I’ll stop there to avoid spoilers. The book has some clever twists and ideas but it’s held back by its middle which dragged on for way too long. There was just too much dilly-dallying and over-descriptive passages and ultimately it bumped this entry down a few spots on my list.
18. Norwegian Wood
Author: Haruki Murakami
Genre: Romance(?), Murakami is kind of his own genre really
Setting: Tokyo, Japan
Murakami needs no introduction, he’s probably one of the most famous authors in the world right now and Norwegian Wood was his breakout novel. The book focuses on a Japanese man, Toru Watanabe, who’s reminiscing about his youth and his romance with two very different women: the timid and emotionally scarred Naoko and the larger-than-life Midori.
As with all Murakami novels, Norwegian Wood doesn’t really have a plot per se. It’s more of an exploration of youth and a young man’s first forays into romance and sexuality. The writing is beautiful and I adore that misty-morning atmosphere that drapes over all of Murakami’s stories but the key weakness of this novel is that Murakami is just a little too horny to take seriously. No, seriously, Murakami has long been criticized for writing shitty female characters that are just caricatures of femininity and sex. I’m looking at you, Naoko.
If I’m gonna be honest, throughout this book I developed a strong hatred for Naoko’s friend Reiko(a side character) because she seemed like a fetishization of Murakami’s weird brain, but what kept me going was Midori. She is a gem and probably the most likeable character in this whole novel. Basically, I stan Midori and if you’re willing to look past Murakami’s strange obsession with writing sex scenes and the obnoxious Reiko, Norwegian Wood is still a beautiful story and by reading it you also get to see one of Murakami’s better-written female characters to date.
17. The Dark Knight and The Puppet Master
Author: Chris Clarke
Genre: Nonfiction, Politics
Setting: Focused mainly on British Politics
Clarke’s book is a riveting dissection of British populism that exposes its many fallacies and falsehoods. The book mainly revolves debunking what Clarke sees as the three main populist myths that Brits should dispel from their minds. The Dark Knight is the myth that there is always an Us vs Them and that any outgroups different from our own are an ‘enemy’ so to speak. The Puppet Master is the myth that society’s problems are deliberately caused by an elite class of aristocrats and that the only way to solve them is to get rid of the establishment. The Golden Era is the myth that past regimes or past administrations were some kind of golden age that we should aspire to return to.
It’s political, but definitely well-enough explained that the layman can understand even some of Clarke’s more abstract points and although Clarke’s arguments are all made in the context of British society and politics, his points are definitely still relevant to any kind of populist movement in any culture, making this book a pertinent read in our turbulent times.
16. Hurricane Season
Author: Fernanda Melchor (Author), Sophie Hughes (Translator)
Genre: Literary Fiction, contains elements of Horror
Setting: La Matosa, Mexico
This book is best described as a nightmare disguised as a novel. It’s about the gruesome death of a character known only as The Witch, who was the epicenter of the poverty-stricken and disease-ridden town of La Matosa. Each of the book’s chapters focuses on a different character that had something to do with the The Witch’s death as Melchor slowly pieces together their intersecting storylines and their unique relationships with The Witch.
If you are easily creeped out then this is probably not the book for you. It’s filled with vulgar language, dark and disturbing scenes, and the setting is a vile town that’s plagued with drugs, crime, sex, poverty and degeneracy. Melchor also isn’t a big fan of paragraphing her story, so you sometimes get sentences that stretch to half a page in length. It suffers from a bit of that stream-of-consciousness writing which is universally loathed, and because the language used is so vulgar and violent, some of the characters sound like the same people. But none of that should take away from the fact that this book is an experience, and a unique one at that. I’ve never known I could feel so uncomfortable reading a book until I read Hurricane Season.
The Mid-Tier: #15–9
15. Monster
Author: Naoki Urasawa
Genre: Psychological Thriller, Seinen Manga
Setting: All over Germany
I know that many have their reservations about manga and I hear them all the time: They’re just power fantasies? Why read a manga when you can just watch the anime? Isn’t manga like super weird tentacle porn or something? These are stereotypes and yes, you can definitely find examples where all of the three assumptions I’ve listed above are true but they definitely do not represent the entire state of manga. Manga is a truly unique storytelling medium that always manages to bring something different to the table. It may not be for everyone, but I’d highly encourage people out there to give it a try and not let stereotypes turn you away from some amazing stories.
Monster is about Kenzo Tenma, a gifted Japanese surgeon working in Düsseldorf who saves the life of a boy named Johan Liebert. Years later, Johan grows up to become a dangerous serial killer and Tenma is embroiled in a mire of conspiracies and secrets in an effort to put a stop to him. Its got a pretty big cast of interesting characters and all the twists and turns you’d want from a good thriller. Oh, and Johan also happens to be one of the best-written villains in the history of Manga so there’s that too.
One thing to note though is that Monster is a slow-burn type of thriller and by that I mean it really takes forever to ramp up its story. I had to put it down a few times to take a break but I can guarantee that if you make it all the way to the end, you’ll find it to be worth every second of time your time.
14. The Crying Of Lot 49
Author: Thomas Pynchon
Genre: Postmodern Fiction
Setting: Somewhere in America
In true Pynchon fashion, The Crying Of Lot 49 is a labyrinthine and paranoia-filled book about Oedipa Maas, a woman who stumbles upon an apparent conspiracy theory. The conspiracy? That two mail distribution companies have secretly been at war since the medieval times and are secretly controlling the flow of global information. As Oedipa digs deeper, she begins to lose her grip on reality as she struggles to ascertain if these secret and all-powerful postmen really do exist or if she’s just losing her mind?
Postmodernist literature is one of the cleverest and most inherently creative genres out there and I respect just how ambitious a novel like Lot 49 is. Unfortunately, postmodernism is also infamous for being extremely obtuse, to the point where it’s often inaccessible to the general public. I sadly cannot claim to have understood all of Pynchon’s themes and ideas in Lot 49 and I’ll admit that this book was really difficult to read, perhaps a little too difficult for a newcomer to postmodernist fiction like myself. Thus, I can’t wholeheartedly put this any higher on the list given that I don’t fully understand what this book is.
13. Twenty Fragments Of A Ravenous Youth
Author: Xiaolu Guo
Genre: Bildungsroman
Setting: Beijing, China
This is the last book I read in 2021 so it’s probably the book that’s most vividly present in my mind, and what a book it was. If you’re wondering what a bildungsroman is, it’s basically a novel that focuses on the growth of a character, usually as they enter adulthood. Twenty Fragments in particular focuses on young Fenfang as she joins awave of thousands of Beijing Drifters seeking a better life in one of China’s big cities. Fenfang however, is ill-suited to the animosity of the big city and gets stuck as a film extra for years without being able to score any credible acting roles. Overall, this is a very easy-to-read book and I breezed through it because it was funny, relatable and most importantly — real and unabashedly so.
12. Orb Scepter Throne
Author: Ian C. Esslemont
Genre: Fantasy
Setting: The Fictional Malazan World
It’s going to be pretty difficult to recommend this book to people, even though I thought it was a fantastic read. Why? Well, because Orb Scepter Throne is book four in a series of six companion novels set in a shared fantasy world with author Steven Erikson’s ten-book masterpiece: The Malazan Book of the Fallen series. You read that right, this is one out of a mind-boggling sixteen-book series.
I’m not even going to bother summarizing the plot of this book because you’re not going to get it if you haven’t read anything Malazan before, so I’ll cheat a little and just recommend the entire series instead. If you call yourself a fantasy-lover and you love the long-running plotlines of Wheel Of Time, the expansive worldbuilding of the Stormlight Archive or the epic battles of Lord of the Rings, please do yourself a favor and read Malazan. It attempts everything I’ve just listed, deconstructs them and reconstructs them in a uniquely Malazan fashion that I have not seen replicated to date. It remains till this day, my favorite book series of all time and these are the first books I read when I started reading seriously back in 2018 so they hold a very special place in my heart. And because us Malazan fans are so few and far between, we will never pass up an opportunity to advertise this absolute masterclass of writing to any potential readers.
11. No Country For Old Men
Author: Cormac McCarthy
Genre: Western (More of a deconstruction of the traditional western to be fair)
Setting: Texas/Mexico Border
McCarthy, widely heralded as one of the last few “Great American Novelists”, crafts a chilling tale about Llewellyn Moss, a Texan who stumbles upon a drug deal gone horribly wrong and pockets two million dollars in cash left at the scene. In doing so, he is hunted by the cold, ruthless and terrifying Anton Chigurh, a hitman hired to recover the stolen money. McCarthy deceives you with the premise of a very traditional western: guy A is running away with a whole lotta cash and guy B is chasing him all over cowboy territory to get it back. But he then flips these conventions on their heads and introduces a “neo-western” backdrop to his story. He touches on themes of death, guilt and fate, which all involve big, open-ended questions and yet, while McCarthy doesn’t seem to give us too many answers to these questions, I feel like I walked away from this book feeling satisfied regardless. A Great American Novel indeed.
10. Mystic River
Author: Dennis Lehane
Genre: Thriller
Setting: Boston, America
This is a thriller through-and-through, it doesn’t try to be anything it’s not and isn’t shy about embracing all the hallmarks of the genre. Conjured from the brilliant mind of Dennis Lehane, who also wrote Shutter Island, Mystic River is a story of three boys: Dave, Sean and Jimmy. One harrowing day, a car driven by two strangers pulls up onto their street. Only one boy gets in the car while the other two escaped. Twenty-five years later, a terrible crime brings the three of them back together again for the first time since that day, with each now carrying their own host of inner demons.
Any connoisseur of the genre would know that the most important part of a suspenseful and intriguing thriller is a good cast of characters. You need a cast with depth and interesting dynamics to sustain any good page-turner and boy, does Lehane do a fantastic job here. Each member of the trio feels gritty and rough-enough-around-the-edges to really make me feel like these were real people with real traumas and not just some make-believe people on a page. The dialogue between characters, especially between the main three, really shines as well. Rarely does an author nail dialogue so well that I’d be happy just listening to his characters talk for the entire book. Unfortunately, I wasn’t a big fan of the ending and some of the twists and maybe this could have fared a little better if it wasn’t a thriller but a bildungsroman (albeit a dark one) about the main three instead? But hey, I’ll take what I can get.
9. Seven To Eternity
Author: Jerome Opeña and Rick Remender
Genre: Can only very loosely describe this as Fantasy
Setting: The Fictional Kingdom of Zhal
As you can tell from the image, Seven To Eternity is a comic, and an amazing one at that. The world of comics is unfortunately marred by a stigma that comics are geeky or nerdy or worst of all, a medium for people that never stopped idolizing superheroes. These are simply untrue and while the whole Marvel/DC dichotomy clearly dominates the bulk of the space in this medium, works like Seven To Eternity and other independent, creator-owned comics offer a whole lot more variety and novelty to the genre as a whole.
Seven To Eternity is set in a world where the Mud King has taken control of the lands and its people with his powers of deception and manipulation, which are granted to him when you agree to hear his whispered bargains and deals. Adam Osidis joins a resistance group in a last-ditch effort to capture the Mud King and take him to the Springs of Zhal where his hold over the people can be dispelled. Obviously things go terribly south along the way and we are treated to a wonderful character study of both Adam and the Mud King, two incredibly layered characters that are never quite what they seem and constantly intriguing. This may be a comic in a fantasy setting, but it’s really a story about human nature, trust and relationships. Its only seventeen issues long so I would highly recommend it for anyone with an open-mind and lots of pockets of time that you want to fill up with a great story.
The Cream Of The Crop #8–4
8. Necropolis
Author: Santiago Gamboa (Author), Howard Curtis (Translator)
Genre: Literary Fiction
Setting: Jerusalem (with side stories taking place in Italy, Columbia and many other location)
Has anyone seen the recently released, cinematic magnum opus that is The French Dispatch by Wes Anderson? If you have, the structure of this book might be familiar to you. This book represents everything I love about genre-less, literary fiction. Once an author exceeds his own limits and conformities, he’s free to experiment with structure and theme and prose in such fascinating ways. Just look at Necropolis’ structure: it’s a book about a Columbian author who’s invited to a literary conference of authors in Jerusalem. While war rages on outside the walls of the conference, each author shares a story. We start off with José Maturana, a former felon who shares his experiences in a religious cult, his complex history with its leaders and the cult’s eventually descent into depravity. Shortly after his sharing, Maturana is found dead in his hotel room. The novel then splits into two streams. On one hand, we follow the author’s efforts to investigate the circumstances of Maturana’s death while aided by an Icelandic journalist named Marta. On the other, we are treated to a platter of other well-crafted stories by the other guests: a tale of two chess players as told by Edgar Miret Supervielle, a modern Monte-Cristo-like story of revenge in Columbia as told by Moisés Kaplan, and an account of a youth marred by drugs, sex and violence as told by Sabina Vedovelli.
This is an intensely rich book. A story about how we tell stories, how we lie, how we reminisce, how we get lost and ultimately, how we can find ourselves again.
7. The Savage Detectives
Author: Roberto Bolaño (Author), Natasha Wimmer (Translator)
Genre: Literary Fiction (Bolaño, like Murakami, should also have his own genre)
Setting: Mexico, Spain, Israel, Mozambique, Nicaragua, France, probably more that I can’t remember
Bolaño’s Savage Detectives is a similar to Necropolis in many ways. They’re both very densely packed, both span the globe and they’ve both abandoned the confines of genre to explore the great unknowns of literature and storytelling. We follow a group of poets who call themselves the Visceral Realists. They’re very outspoken and critical of the state of poetry in Mexico yet ironically, publish almost no laudable poetry of their own and and mostly just sit around being bums. The bulk of the novel focuses on the two founders of visceral realism, Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, as they wander across Europe, Africa and South America in search of true poetry. Along the way they fall in love, get thrown in jail, Arturo challenges a critic to a sword duel, Ulises meets with neo-nazis and so on and so forth. Oh, and one of the coolest parts about this novel is that while the novel is mostly about Arturo and Ulises, their stories and character outlines are created via “negative space”. What I mean is that we get to read over forty different POVs of various characters and their interactions with Arturo and Ulises, but we never get to see their own perspectives. So our understanding of these two is formed solely from the intersection of many conflicting and unreliable viewpoints from other characters, hence “negative space”.
I won’t blame anyone for feeling daunted by this book because it is huge and really different from what most people are used to reading, but I think Bolaño functions as a great gateway drug to not only South American literature but to more avant-garde literature as well so if you’re willing to take a leap of faith, get ready for a wild ride.
6. Chainsaw Man
Author: Tatsuki Fujimoto
Genre: Seinen/Shounen Manga (not sure where exactly it falls)
Setting: Tokyo, Japan
Okay, some might cancel me for putting Chainsaw Man above the likes of Savage Detectives but while I do think that literary works like Savage Detectives are amazing, the manga lover within me enjoyed Chainsaw Man just a little more.
Chainsaw Man is set in a world where manifestations of human fears like the fear of the dark, or the fear of insects or of guns manifests as creatures called devils, whose powers are directly proportionate to the amount of fear they incite in humans. These devils are mostly a nuisance to the human world but some can willingly form contracts with devil hunters to grant them some of their powers in exchange for not being hunted. The manga follows the story of Denji, a man who makes a contract with the chainsaw devil after being betrayed by the Yakuza.
I know it sounds a little cheesy or campy but I’m a sucker for great power systems and mechanics in fantastical fiction and the concept of devils in Chainsaw Man is executed flawlessly. It’s unique and something unexpected too, which was a breath of fresh air in a crowded Shounen genre that’s suffering from staleness. It also contains many Seinen elements as well which is always a plus for me. Chainsaw Man has been getting rather popular lately so I’d urge prospective readers to get in on the hype now for the best possible experience.
5. Excession
Author: Iain M. Banks
Genre: Science Fiction
Setting: Far Future Space, in the space-faring, human civilization known as The Culture
Excession is one of ten books in a science fiction series known as The Culture. Don’t worry, it’s more of a shared universe rather than a series, so you don’t have to have read any other culture book before Excession although you definitely should check the others out because they’re fantastic. Banks introduces us to a far-future, utopian-like human civilization known as the Culture, which has become something of a superpower in the galaxy. Humans in the Culture are so advanced that they have attained almost full mastery over their environment and science. They’ve also invented Minds, which are AIs of such a caliber of intelligence and sentience that they are entrusted to basically keep the entire civilization running. The crux of the book revolves around the emergence of an Excession, which is an alien artifact that baffles even the power of the Minds. We’re given an amazingly imaginative look into how such an advanced civilization would respond to an “outside-context problem” like the Excession. Do they seek to eliminate it pre-emptively? Or perhaps try to establish communications with whoever placed it there? Maybe in their hubris they would just ignore it and carry on with their hedonistic lifestyles? All of these questions are explored and Banks left me craving more of this brand of science fiction. Not too many Sci-Fi authors write about giant space operas in the 50th millennium anymore so we should cherish Excession as an endangered species of novel.
4. The Power Broker
Author: Robert Caro
Genre: Biography
Setting: New York in the 1930s
This is a Pulitzer-Prize -winning biography about the rise, reign and fall of Robert Moses. In case you’re wondering who that’s supposed to be, he’s the public official responsible for building many of New York’s most famous landmarks including the United Nations Headquarters, the Triborough Bridge and many of Long Island’s parks. However, as detailed in the extensive and surgical research of Caro, Moses was also a ruthless, power-hungry mogul who’s actions irreversibly hindered many New Yorkers, especially poorer New Yorkers, even till this day. Moses conducted mass evictions of New York’s poorer housing projects to make way for expensive and unaffordable condos to satisfy his own vision. His insistence on turning New York into a fully auto-driven city led to millions of dollars being splurged on highways and bridges and roads that only got more and more congested with every year. His refusal to allow for the development and maintenance of a proper public transport infrastructure has made commuting in the Big Apple an expensive and time-consuming process even today.
Caro’s scathing biography places Moses under the spotlight and illuminates how men in power can often get away with actions of grave consequence. The only thing stopping most people from reading this book is its sheer size. Coming in at a whopping 1200+ pages, this isn’t a casual read. It took me over a month to finish, but I emerged at the other end of the tunnel with bucket-loads of insight into the world of the elite and powerful that’s definitely worth the time invested.
The Tip Of The Spear #3–1
3. The Bridge
Author: Iain M. Banks
Genre: Literary Fiction, technically a romance as well
Setting: England, Scotland, as well as “The Bridge”, a fictional civilization literally living on an extremely long bridge
I never would have expected this, but The Bridge is actually the closest thing to Christopher Nolan’s Inception that I’ve ever read. There really isn’t much else I can reveal without spoiling some major plot points but I’ll just try and lay out the basic gist of the story and if you can piece together how amazing this premise is then that should be all the convincing you’ll need to go out and read this one.
We follow the stories of three protagonists. First is Alex, a real Glaswegian living in the real world. Alex struggles with his feelings for on-and-off girlfriend Andrea Cramond because while they both clearly have feelings for each other, Andrea is never quite able to commit to a monogamous life. Alex also feels remorse over his supposed betrayal of his own working-class roots to become a member of “the elite” that he so fervently lambasted back in his youth, which strands him between two social classes. At his lowest point, he becomes distracted by the engineering feat that is the Forth Road Bridge and gets into a car accident, landing himself in a coma with the bridge being the last thing he sees.
John Orr is an amnesiac patient living in a clinical facility within a fictional world known only as the Bridge, which houses a whole civilization and is at least a few hundred miles long. John Orr is very reluctant to recover his memories despite his psychoanalysts and doctors’ repeated attempts to get him to remember his past. He also meets an enigmatic woman named Abberlaine Arrol, who seems to show some genuine affection and interest in John, yet remains distant at the same time.
Lastly, we have the Barbarian, a vulgar savage who inhabits a very strange, dreamlike world that parodies the world of ancient Greek legends. The Barbarian speaks in heavily accented Scottish slang but as his story progresses his speech seems to become more refined (hmmm…). He also seems to have a very deep-seated hatred for women (double hmmm…). Oh and did I also mention that his chapters always happen right after John Orr falls asleep( triple hmm…)?
If you’re not intrigued by this premise, you should probably move on because this book is not overt in its themes or plot. It is a very subtle book in many ways and if you managed to connect some dots in my little summary there then you should definitely consider reading it for yourself.
2. Ghostwritten
Author: David Mitchell
Genre: Literary Fiction
Setting: All Over The World
I just did a full breakdown of this novel recently so I shan’t repeat too many of my own points. Basically, Ghostwritten is a book consisting of nine interconnected stories that takes place all over the world from Japan to Russia to New York. There’s not much in the way of an overarching narrative as Mitchell chooses to focus more on thematically dissecting some key tenets of our modern world, including but not limited to: time, fate and chance, the concept of space in ultra-urban environments and post-humanism too.
You can read more about my thoughts in my in-depth review, but a TLDR would be that Ghostwritten is a book all about modernity and how we should go about approaching it as a species. It’s one that that I think should feature more in classrooms and literature lessons. I mean, its prose is simple enough to set a low barrier-to-entry for all audiences yet it tackles critical themes in a much more contemporary setting compared to many of the archaic classics written decades ago that we, for some reason, insist on keeping around as compulsory reading material instead of welcoming newer entries to the literary canon. This isn’t my number one book of 2021, but in terms of both accessibility to the layman and quality of writing, if you’re only going to read one book in this whole list, I’d say you’re best shot would be to go with Ghostwritten.
1. The Sympathizer
Author: Viet Thanh Nguyen
Genre: Spy, Historical Fiction, Black Comedy
Setting: Vietnam and America in the aftermath of the Vietnam War
Here it is, my favorite novel of the year. It’s a fairly popular book that won Nguyen the Pulitzer Prize in 2016 and Nguyen actually wrote a sequel titled The Commited which released earlier this year (although I haven’t gotten around to reading it just yet). The Sympathizer features an unnamed narrator who acts as a mole for the North Vietnamese, planted within the ranks of the South Vietnamese Army. After the Fall of Saigon, he travels with the exiled elite of South Vietnamese Army as they move to the United States for refuge, where he will face challenges in dealing with the many conflicting facets of his own identity and mind.
This story is all about duality and conflict. The author, is a Vietnamese-American and has stated in interviews that his experiences growing up at the vanishing point of two vastly different cultures was a huge inspiration for the novel. The Narrator of the book is himself, a French-Vietnamese and his struggles with racism and bullying due to his mixed heritage are thoroughly explored in the novel. The Narrator is also playing the role of a double-agent, stuck right in the midst of a community that is at odds with his own. The Narrator even faces a clash between the occidental and oriental once the story reaches the shores of America as Nguyen exposes hard truths of life as an immigrant in the West.
Speaking from the perspective of a someone who was born and raised in Singapore, a country that is quite literally sitting in between the cultural spheres of the East and West, I think The Sympathizer is a book that can really hit home for people like myself. And I’m willing to bet that especially in a world as cosmopolitan as the one we’re living in today, more people than ever before would have thought about some of the points that Nguyen brings up during their own introspection at some point. It really is the definition of a relevant book and it is an amazing read that would be worth anyone’s time.
Lastly, I want to talk a bit about the last hundred or so pages of this book. I finished this last section of the book in one sitting because I literally could not put it down. That’s how amazing it was. I won’t spoil the details for anyone, but our Narrator undergoes a very personal, emotional and intense ordeal that, quite literally, reshapes the fault lines of his mind and soul. It was an absolutely bedazzling experience for me to read and I wholeheartedly recommend this book, if not for any other praise I’ve already given it, then solely so that more people can enjoy those last hundred pages.
