{"product_id":"the-sympathizer-easton-press-signed-collectors-edition","title":"The Sympathizer (Easton Press Signed Collector's Edition)","description":"\u003cp class=\"font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]\"\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eNGUYEN, Viet Thanh.\u003c\/strong\u003e \u003cem\u003eThe Sympathizer.\u003c\/em\u003e Norwalk, Connecticut: The Easton Press, 2016.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]\"\u003eOctavo. Full red leather. Spine with raised bands, 22-carat gilt accents. All edges gilt. Moiré silk endpapers. Satin ribbon page marker. 371 pp. \u003cstrong\u003eSigned 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.\u003c\/strong\u003e Originally published New York: Grove Press, 2015.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]\"\u003eViet 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. \u003cem\u003eThe Sympathizer\u003c\/em\u003e 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]\"\u003eThe 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]\"\u003eWhat 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 \u003cem\u003eApocalypse Now\u003c\/em\u003e, 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 \u003cem\u003eNew York Times\u003c\/em\u003e 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 \u003cem\u003eGuardian\u003c\/em\u003e 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]\"\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eFine. \u003c\/strong\u003ePresenting as new.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]\"\u003eThis book is currently not on display in store. If you would like more information or to arrange a viewing, please contact: \u003ca href=\"mailto:rarebooks@harryhartog.com.au\" title=\"Harry Hartog Rare Book Department\"\u003erarebooks@harryhartog.com.au\u003c\/a\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]\"\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eCatalogue Number: HH000521\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Viet Thanh Nguyen","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":49072195666163,"sku":"1110002990465","price":120.0,"currency_code":"AUD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0634\/4284\/5939\/files\/1_a828388f-4462-4339-8c27-334daeffaa91.png?v=1779084236","url":"https:\/\/www.harryhartog.com.au\/products\/the-sympathizer-easton-press-signed-collectors-edition","provider":"Harry Hartog Bookseller","version":"1.0","type":"link"}