Jules’s Reviews > The Sympathizer > Status Update

The last 100 pages certainly sped things up, and made up for much of what I disliked in the first 3/4 of the book (slow introspection). That being said the content of the last 100 pages was awful. I see why it won the 2016 Pulitzer. I’d recommend it only to people who have an interest in history and a stomach for war.

Besides sadness and sorrow, he had asked me, what’s really heavy but weighs nothing at all? When he saw that I was stumped, he said, Nihilism, which was, in fact his philosophy.

[...]so, just to be polite, I cast a tasteful glance[...]In between those marvelous breasts bumped a gold crucifix on a gold chain, & for once I wished I were a true Christian so I could be nailed to that cross."

Hilarious paragraph devoted to cleavage

[...]separated a woman from a man & yet drew him to her with the irresistible force of sliding down a slippery slope. Men had no equivalent, except, perhaps, for the only kind of male cleavage most women truly cared for, the opening & closing of a well-stuffed billfold

[...] semi-exposed breasts was not only engaging in simple lasciviousness, he was also meditating, even if unawares, on the visual embodiment of the verb "to cleave," which meant both to cut apart and to put together. A woman's cleavage perfectly illustrated this double and contradictory meaning, the breasts two separate entities with one identity. The double meaning was also present in how cleavage separated [...]

All this time I kept my gaze fixed on hers, an enormously difficult task given the gravitational pull exerted by her cleavage. While I was critical of many things when it came to so-called Western civilization, cleavage was not one of them. The Chinese might have invented gunpowder and the noodle, but the West had invented cleavage, with profound if underappreciated implications. A man gazing on semi- [...]

Disarming an idealist was easy. One only needed to ask why the idealist was not on the front line of the particular battle he had chosen. The question was one of commitment[…]

[…] cont 199. But while science fiction imagined time travelers as moving forward or backward in time, this timepiece demonstrated a different chronology. The open secret of the clock, naked for all to see, was that we were only going in circles.” (War - winning and losing - going in circles)

199 (vietnam shaped clock set to Saigon time, 14hrs off) “Refugee, exile, immigrant— whatever species of displaced human we were, we did not simply live in 2 cultures, as celebrants of the great American melting pot imagined. Displaced people also lived in 2 time zones, the here and the there, the present and the past, being as we were reluctant time travelers. [… cont]

Some craftsman in exile had understood that this was exactly the timepiece his refugee countrymen desired. We were displaced persons, but it was time more than space that defined us. While the distance to return to our lost country was far but finite, the # of years it would take to close that distance was potentially infinite. Thus, for displaced people, the 1st question was always about time: When can I return?