The Interpreter: A Novel

Summary

Pulitzer prize-winning author David K. Shipler’s fictionalized story of a Vietnamese interpreter, based on his own experiences as a war correspondent, brings back the tensions within Vietnam during the war, focusing on a local with close ties to American journalists and politicians. 

The Interpreter is based on the true story of a Vietnamese translator who is wounded—not physically—by a love of country too pure for the contaminated choices that confront him. Dragged by an inner search, he has wandered among the neat categories of allegiance imposed by Vietnam’s lifetime of warfare and foreign occupation.

But he fits into none of the available boxes—not Communist, not Government, not pro-American, nor any of the assortment of political dissidents who populate the shadowy warrens of Saigon. He finds no home with either the tortured or the torturers. Instead, he tries to interpret Vietnam through an evolving comradeship with an American correspondent, to distant, weary audiences who barely listen anymore. He commits a futile betrayal against the correspondent’s wife. He harbors a secret. He clings to a simple nobility, he believes, as an authentic Vietnamese of transcendent patriotism, and so he keeps his footing in the whirlwind of panic as Saigon falls. By refusing an offer to escape with his family to the US, he consigns his future to an intricate, stumbling dance with the victorious Communist regime.

This man is fictionalized, but he is not alone in the world. His torment is a hidden story not only of Vietnam but of the hundreds like him who have interpreted their war-torn countries for the foreigners who fuel the fighting with weapons and blood.