Pas réussi à renter dedans, abandonné ( )

This book is about a personal journey into betrayal and loyalty, written as a confession by the nameless narrator, a double agent from the Vietcong working as captain in the Southern Army special police. Betrayal is everywhere: by colonizers and imperialists, convinced of their moral right to kill millions and rewrite history at will to cover their tracks (brilliantly represented in the chapters on the making of Apocalypse Now, where the Narrator discovers the power of the American propaganda); by the American people, showing total disdain for the new immigrants; and of course by the Narrator's father, a French priest, who engrossed a teenage Vietnamese girl (his mother) and refuses to recognize his child, making him a "bastard". But also loyalty, with his two childhood friends - Bon, the Southern army assassin, who escapes with him to the US, and Man, the Viet Cong ideologue who stays behind to build a new country - who appear as a representation of his own two sides. This tension is brought to its climax, where the narrator must make a choice, and understands the vacuity of it all. The book is also a cry for recognition, for those forced to leave their countries and live with the broken mirror of their identities on other shores. There are many choice pages, sometimes very funny, describing America viewed by its Asian immigrants, such as the one where Ms Mori, the narrator's lover and herself of Japanese extraction, affirms her right not to have any ties with her Japanese culture, and asking rhetorically whether people meeting the Kennedys expected them to speak Gaelic.

The writing is dramatic and long winded, high on the gory and low on the erotic, perhaps another good representation of America. The author makes ample use of stylistic devices and rhetorical forms, particularly of metaphors, comparisons and other methods of amplification, as Klee and Buffet use thick black lines for emphasis. Although the author undoubtedly is using his extraordinary creative talent for the reader's benefit, I have found at times the style a touch overbearing. ( )