‘The Sympathizer’ Executive Producers Break Down Book-to-Screen Adaptation

variety.com:

Rachel Seo “I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces.” So begins Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Sympathizer,” which, when released in 2015, was hailed for its humorous, biting interrogation of American perspectives on the Vietnam War.

Integrating elements of the espionage thriller à lá John le Carré with a heavy sense of irony reminiscent of Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man,” “The Sympathizer” is told from the viewpoint of an officer in the U.S.-supported South Vietnam army who secretly reports back to communists in North Vietnam.

Framed as a confession to the people for whom he has ostensibly been spying, the narrator — who goes unnamed in the novel — chronicles the story of his journey to Southern California, where he joins the Vietnamese refugee community settling there and grapples with questions of loyalty and assimilation.

In a 2015 interview, Nguyen, who is a professor at the University of Southern California, said he wrote the book as a reaction to the dearth of literature that, “directly confronts the history of the American war in Vietnam from the Vietnamese American point of view.” “I sensed a reluctance to be angry at American culture or at the United States for what it has done,” Nguyen said, adding that the book is also “very critical of South Vietnamese culture and politics and Vietnamese communism.” Instead of choosing its targets selectively—only being critical of one group—it decides to hold everyone accountable.” Nearly nine years after the book’s publication and forty-nine years after the end of the Vietnam War, the novel about a “man with two faces” now also has a second face, in the form of the HBO series of the same name, from co-showrunners Park Chan-Wook and Don.