The Sympathizer (The Sympathizer #1)

by Viet Thanh Nguyen

So it was that we soaped ourselves in sadness and we rinsed ourselves with hope, and for all that we believed almost every rumor we heard, almost all of us refused to believe that our nation was dead.

I just liked this sentence a lot when I wrote it. The rhythm, the metaphor of showering. I was obsessed in this novel with trying to find as many striking images as I could, partly because I was beholden to two novels: António Lobo Antunes’ THE LAND AT THE END OF THE WORLD, in which almost every sentence has a remarkable image, and Vladimir Nabokov’s LOLITA, with its memorable line that “You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.” By the end of THE SYMPATHIZER, you know why this sentence matters.