Upper Middlebrow

Upper Middlebrow


Episode 50: “Nothing is More Important,” or Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer, Part II

April 08, 2024

The Sympathizer is brought to a powerful, if occasionally puzzling conclusion, with the narrator returning to his home country for a series of misadventures. The meaning of Ho Chi Minh’s slogan “Nothing is more precious than independence and freedom” is turned around and around in our narrator’s brain, until nothing comes to mean something.