Category Archives: Book Reviews 2025

“Have you read The Sympathizer?” asked my son as we were planning our trip to Vietnam. Great book, he said although I did have a qualm or two as I packed it. Would it would be viewed as suitable reading matter should the Customs Officers at Ho Chi Minh city airport decide that my cases needed to be inspected? It is a great book, and no one had much interest in my suitcases at the airport after they had been scanned. It was the winner of the Pulitizer Prize for Fiction in 2016, and a worthy one too.

Framed as a confession written by an unnamed Vietnamese double agent for the shadowy Commandant, the narrator is a Vietnamese army captain who is working under cover for the North Vietnamese. We do not know who the Commandant is, or in whose custody our narrator is, or why.  He is obviously being told to rewrite his confession because there is something missing, so it is a slippery narrative.

Our narrator is a man of divided loyalties on many sides: his father was a French priest who took advantage of his young, now deceased mother, and he is shunned as not being ‘properly’ Vietnamese. His closest friends were Man and Bon, and they shared the scar on their hands that they made as blood brothers.  They did not, however, share their politics, as Bon becomes an ardent South Vietnamese patriot in exile in America with our narrator. During the war, our narrator worked with the American troops, and after the war he infiltrates the South Vietnamese diaspora community based in America. He becomes a sort of cultural consultant for a film which sounds very much like ‘Apocalypse Now’ (and indeed, books about Coppolla and the making of the the movie are credited in his references) and at times the book is quite funny as the Auteur reveals his complete disregard for the Vietnamese people who are just fodder to his film-making vision.

But the confessor’s hands are not clean. When suspicion arises that there is a mole in the diapora community, he fingers a man he calls ‘the crapulent major’ instead, and assassinates him. When a journalist called Sonny moves in on a woman he has fallen in love with, he assassinates him too. According to this clearly self-serving and written-to-order confession, he is haunted by these two deaths, although early crimes committed in his presence are left unnamed.

The ending of the book is graphic, but I found myself wanting to push through to find out who the commandant, and his superior the commissar were and how he found himself in this situation- a sign that the narrative strength of the book could overcome my own squeamishness.

My enjoyment of the book was probably enhanced, having read it in Vietnam, immersed in museums commemorating the struggle for independence and the end of the war, and moving through areas that were just names in the news reports of the 1960s and 1970s. But even had I read it in cold old Melbourne, I still would have been fascinated by the split nature and slipperiness of the narrative, and the situation that led our confessor to write this tract.

My rating: 9/10

Read because: I was in Vietnam

To be honest, I don’t know if I understood this book. I enjoyed it enough while I was reading it, but whenever I tried to conceptualize in my mind what it was about, the whole thing just seemed too slippery and unformed.

The frame story revolves around a young doctor, Natalia, who is travelling back to an unnamed country in the Balkans, after the region has been torn apart and clumsily reassembled after the civil war. She, and her friend (partner?) Zora are moving into remote villages in order to vaccinate children whose childhoods have been disrupted by the war. Far from home, she learns that her beloved grandfather has died. Her grandfather had been a pivotal part of her childhood, taking her to the zoo to see the tiger, who held a special fascination for her grandfather.

With her grandfather much on her mind, she recalls two stories that her grandfather, also a doctor, had told her. One was of the Tiger’s Wife, a young deaf-mute woman married to a brutal man, who somehow (don’t ask me how) becomes the wife of a tiger that had escaped and was terrorizing the surrounding villages. He had met the Tiger’s Wife as a child. The second story was of the Deathless Man, who warns people that they are about to die, even though he cannot die himself. Her grandfather encounters the Deathless Man several times in his life.

War is an ongoing presence in the book. Natalia is living in the wake of the most recent Balkans war, but war is threaded through her grandfather’s life as well. In the villages, people are digging up the remains of their relatives buried in the fields, and war has claimed the tiger that Natalia visited as a child as well, as it gnaws off its own paws through stress.

The narrative switches backwards and forwards, and even though the individual stories were engaging, eliciting your sympathy for characters who were otherwise unlovely, they do not hang together into a coherent whole- or if they do, I couldn’t detect it. I am not uncomfortable with magic realism but it seemed incongruent in this dark, war-haunted country. If there was a deeper meaning connecting the stories, I couldn’t find it, even though I felt that it was just beyond my grasp.

Very clever, or too tricksy? I think the latter.

My rating: 6/10

Sourced from: my own bookshelves

It is a paradox that repressive penal systems try to break an individual in two opposed ways. Either they quash the individual through impossible labour in a mass dehumanizing project (I’m thinking here of the long-ago-read The Gulag Archipelago or One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich) or they annihilate prisoners’ identity through enforced idleness and solitary confinement. University of Melbourne academic Kylie Moore-Gilbert was arrested in September 2018 on charges of espionage, and spent over a year in solitary confinement during her 804 days in the Iranian Evin and Qarchak prisons.

By its very nature, it’s hard to write about solitary confinement, because just like the space and the endless nothingness, there’s only so many words in which to express it. When the stream of days is broken by Ramadan for a second time, she is struck by the waste of her life:

Thinking about Ramadan a year later meant the unbearable realisation that I had wasted another twelve months of my life in 2A. Twelve months in a world whose total inhabitants could be counted on both hands. Twelve months in a world which had to be navigated in darkness, via touch and sound and slivers of light through the edges of a blindfold. Twelve months in which time did not exist, in which each day was both a minute and a decade, in which each week was both a second and a hundred years. Last Ramadan felt like it was only yesterday, because so little had happened in the interim. But then again, everything had happened. Everything and nothing. (p. 249-50)

I seem to have read or watched a couple of accounts of imprisonment lately (the film The Correspondent – review here– and books and articles about Jose Mujica). What comes over strongly with both Peter Greste and Kylie Moore-Gilbert is their utter bewilderment as the framing of charges seems to change over time and comes long after the initial arrest. Both Australians feel poorly served by many of the embassy officials dealing with them at first (although this seems to shift with time) and both feel that nothing is being done at an inter-government level to seek their release. The advice given to families at home to keep quiet and leave it to the government flies in the face of what both Greste and Moore-Gilbert felt they needed in the situation, and in both cases hunger striking and intransigence attracted more attention – not always welcome- than compliance and silence.

For Moore-Gilbert, the experience of solitary confinement, and having to return to it for a promised 96 hours that stretched into months, was almost intolerable. At times she urged that her behaviour, which at times was unwise, be considered as a symptom of mental illness and she was certainly dosed up with anti-depressants and sleeping tablets.

The most unnerving and treacherous aspect of her imprisonment was the complex relationship she had with her main interrogator Qazi Zadeh from the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard. Saturnine and powerful, she claims that he began flirting with her, while incredibly having his wife appointed to supervise her. She needed to walk the tightrope of resisting his advances, while trying to leverage them to her advantage. Just as freedom was within her grasp, she found herself blocked by him, in a bizarre attempt to keep her in jail so that he could continue to contact her. It must have been a lonely, high-stakes situation where she could trust no-one, and in a mis-step she told his wife that the relationship was not of her volition. It only made it worse for her.

What made it possible to continue with the book was the knowledge that she did, eventually, gain release in exchange for three Iranian prisoners held by the Thai government. Was everything possible done by the Australian government for her? At the end of the book she is grateful to Nick Warner and the Australian ambassador Lyndall Sachs, although she has raised questions about the softly-softly approach.

She notes that 43 years of Islamic Republic rule has plunged Iran into a “crisis of human rights of unfathomable proportions” with the country becoming an open-air prison of 84 million people (p. 403). As occurred with Peter Greste, and with other political prisoners, she finishes the book with a plea for other political prisoners who have not been released.

I can’t help but be profoundly affected by what I witnessed inside some of Iran’s worst prisons. I feel it is my duty to speak up for my friends, as it is to tell the truth about what happened to me. If the events I have recounted in this book have similarly touched you, dear reader, I ask you, too, to use your voice. When you are a prisoner, knowing that there are people on the outside who support you and care about your plight truly can be the difference between giving up or continuing the fight. (p. 403)

We can only take her word for it.

My rating: 8/10

Read because: I had been aware of her imprisonment and wanted to learn about the experience from her perspective as an academic.

This is a dialogue between the ex-president of Uruguay, Jose Mujica, and Kintto Lucas, a journalist, writer and Vice-Chancellor and Ambassador for Uruguay under Mujica’s government. As Lucas explains in the introduction, he first met Mujica in the Punta Carretas prison in 1971, when Lucas was just eight years old. He visited his older brother, who like Mujica was a member of the National Liberation Movement – Tupamaros (MLN-T) every Saturday. This was the prison from which 106 Tupamaros escaped in 1971 by tunnelling out of the prison, but Lucas’ brother was not among them. His cell had been changed at the last minute, and he no longer had access to the tunnel. However, by 1972 he was released and exiled to Chile. Kintto left Uruguay in 1980 and lived in Brazil until he returned after the withdrawal of the military in 1985. On his return he joined the MLN as a militant and worked as a journalist on a Mate Amargo bi-weekly Tupumaro newspaper, which became the best-selling newspaper in Uruguay.

Why am I talking so much about the author, and not Mujica himself? That’s because Lucas himself is front and centre in this book, with a 54 page introduction and he certainly doesn’t take a backward step in the interview, either. I didn’t bother counting the words, but I suspect that Lucas talks as much as Mujica does, and at times I just wanted him to shut up.

There’s lots of internal Uruguayan politics in here, which went right over my head. Still, it was good to get beyond the aphorisms and homespun wisdom that Mujica repeated over and over in his many interviews with Western journalists. I’m not sure whether this book was written in English or Spanish- an editor is credited, but not a translator- but it is rather strangled English and not particularly pleasant to read. As Mujica rarely spoke English, I think that this is a transcript of a Spanish conversation translated by the author, but it does not read particularly well.

Apparently when the Tupamaros held up a bank or a cinema, they would harangue the literally captive audience about politics and justice, before letting most of them leave. Reading this, you go away feeling rather ear-bashed by both of them too.

My rating: 6/10

Sourced from: Kindle e-book.