![]() ![]() Nguyen’s first book examined America’s relationship to Vietnam’s imperial history. Then he moves to more dangerous clients and more dangerous drugs, sliding down a slippery slope of bad luck, indifference, and casual avarice. The sympathizer becomes a drug dealer in the Paris underworld, supplying Marxist academics with cannabis at first. The answer, as it turns out, is that he’d pursue a career of crime. I wanted to pursue that question of what a revolutionary without a revolution would do next.” ![]() In the novel’s last pages, they are released and set off in a refugee boat, sailing to France and Nguyen’s second novel.Īt the beginning of The Committed, Nguyen told me, his narrator is a “revolutionary who has become disillusioned with communism but hadn’t given up on the idea of the necessity of revolution itself. He and Bon are tortured in a communist Vietnamese prison camp. By the end of that book, he has perpetrated enough atrocities that euphemisms no longer serve, especially since atrocities have also been committed against him. “Even as a secret policeman, however, I never used violence insomuch as I allowed others to use it in front of me,” the narrator rationalizes with urbane equivocation. ![]() The sympathizer follows the general from Vietnam to the United States when the war is lost and then returns back to Vietnam, committing along the way various horrific acts for causes he believes are noble-until he starts to wonder if they aren’t. The other, Bon, is a rabid anti-communist in the South Vietnamese general’s service, blithely unaware that the narrator is a spy. He is caught between his two blood brothers. The first book is told by an unnamed narrator, the sympathizer in the title, who serves as a North Vietnamese spy to a South Vietnamese general. The Committed, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Grove Press, 368 pp., $27, March 2021 Both literary thriller and novel of ideas, The Committed is a blistering portrayal of commitment and betrayal that will cement Viet Thanh Nguyen's position in the firmament of American letters.The Committed, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Grove Press, 368 pp.,, March 2021 The Sympathizer will need all his wits, resourcefulness, and moral flexibility if he is to prevail. But the new life he is making has perils he has not foreseen, whether the self-torture of addiction, the authoritarianism of a state locked in a colonial mindset, or the seeming paradox of how to reunite his two closest friends whose worldviews put them in absolute opposition. As he falls in with a group of left-wing intellectuals whom he meets at dinner parties given by his French Vietnamese "aunt," he finds stimulation for his mind but also customers for his narcotic merchandise. Traumatized by his reeducation at the hands of his former best friend, Man, and struggling to assimilate into French culture, the Sympathizer finds Paris both seductive and disturbing. The pair try to overcome their pasts and ensure their futures by engaging in capitalism in one of its purest forms: drug dealing. The long-awaited new novel from one of America's most highly regarded contemporary writers, The Committed follows the unnamed Sympathizer as he arrives in Paris in the early 1980s with his blood brother Bon. The sequel to The Sympathizer, which won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction and went on to sell over a million copies worldwide, The Committed tells the story of "the man of two minds" as he comes as a refugee to France and turns his hand to capitalism. ![]()
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