The Sympathizer (The Sympathizer #1)

by Viet Thanh Nguyen

So it was that I committed my first unnatural act at thirteen with a gutted squid purloined from my mother’s kitchen, where it awaited its proper fate along with its companions.

In one moment early in the book, our narrator has a flashback to the moment he lost his virginity…with a squid. Hmm. Judging from Goodreads reviews, about 1% of readers felt this was a cephalopod too far. As lowminded as this passage is (and what’s wrong with that?), there is a highminded conclusion, but I’m not sure if my distressed readers made it that far or noticed if they did, which is that in the larger scheme of things—murder, massacre, warfare—which we as a society can generally talk about, a sexual encounter of the squid kind is nothing! And, of course, I am only alluding to the hilarious episode in Philip Roth’s PORTNOY'S COMPLAINT, which I read at far too young of an age, where Portnoy does the unmentionable with a slab of liver from the family fridge…which he then returns it to for the family dinner later that night. That, dear readers, is Literature.