Pleasures abound, such as the narrator’s hair-raising escapes, descriptions of the Boss’s hokey bar (“This was the new and modern Orient, where opium was both cool and quaint, chic and cute, addictive and undemanding”), and thoughtful references to Fanon and Césaire. The Committed by Viet Thanh Nguyen review challenging colonialism Journeying into the Parisian underworld, this powerful follow-up to The Sympathizer is a political novel that masquerades as a. The novel draws its true enchantment and its immense power from the propulsive, wide-ranging intelligence of our narrator as he Virgils us. Nguyen is no le Carr and doesn’t wish to be. Viet Thanh Nguyen (Goodreads Author) 3.97 Rating details 6,427 ratings 931 reviews The long-awaited new novel from one of America’s most highly regarded contemporary writers, The Committed follows the Sympathizer as he arrives in Paris as a refugee. The book works both as sequel and standalone, with Nguyen careful to fold in needed backstory, and the author’s wordplay continues to scratch at the narrator’s fractured sense of self (“I am not just one but two. The Committed indulges in espionage high jinks aplenty, but in truth the author is not as interested in them as a cursory plot summary might indicate. Meanwhile, there are opportunity for socializing, revenge, and reunions at the Vietnamese Union.
Indeed, he’s chagrined to discover his rivals, French Arabs who share with him a legacy of colonization, want him dead. The gig has him more vexed about the crime of capitalism than that of drug dealing, and he’s not expecting a turf war. A refugee several times over, he’s fleeing both Vietnam, where he was brutally tortured by his own allies in a reeducation camp, and the United States, which has rejected him in its own fashion. Vo Danh starts selling hashish for a Viet-Chinese drug lord called the Boss, whom he and Bon met in their refugee camp. Unflinching in tone, ambitious, witty, subversive, and profoundly haunting, The Committed challenges an America that. The fractured, guilt-ridden narrator, a veteran of the South Vietnamese Army, where he was a mole for the communists, goes by his assumed name Vo Danh, which means “nameless.” He has survived reeducation and a refugee camp and is now living in early 1980s Paris, along with his devoutly anti-communist “blood brother,” Bon, who doesn’t know he was a double agent. Set against the noir backdrop of 1980s Paris, Nguyen’s long-awaited sequel is something between a thriller, philosophy, and a ghost story, confronting the dark red stain left on the narrator by colonialism and the Vietnam War.
The sequel to Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize–winning The Sympathizer is an exhilarating roller-coaster ride filled with violence, hidden identity, and meditations on whether the colonized can ever be free.
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