
In his opinion piece “Starving for Wisdom,” Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times presents yet another spirited defense of an education in the humanities. Literature, he writes, “builds bridges of understanding. Toni Morrison has helped all America understand African-American life.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer (2015), which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction on Monday, does much the same work for another group. The narrator, a divided self (he is the illegitimate, American-educated son of a French Catholic priest and a Vietnamese woman) from a divided country, is forced to write a confession about his failings as a Communist spy who was embedded with the South Vietnamese national police force. Acknowledging these multiple divisions, the narrator describes himself as “a man of two faces” who can “see any issue from both sides.”
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