“With smoke-and-mirrors panache, The Committed-Viet Thanh Nguyen’s sequel to The Sympathizer-continues the travails of our Eurasian Ulysses, now relocated to France and self-identified as Vo Danh. May that voice keep running like a purifying venom through the mainstream of our self-regard-through the American dream of distancing ourselves from what we continue to show ourselves to be.” -Jonathan Dee, New Yorker It’s a voice that shakes the walls of the old literary comfort zone wherein the narratives of nonwhite ‘immigrants’ were tasked with proving their shared humanity to a white audience. It’s the voice of the novels that matters, that ramifies, that keeps one reading: the anger, the indictment, the deep, questioning cynicism. The absence of conventional craft, as much as the shared content, makes the two books into a single project. “The action of the new novel, set in 1981, is chronologically contiguous with that of The Sympathizer, but ‘sequel’ isn’t quite the right word for it it’s more like a reloading. If this incandescent novel teaches us anything, it is that forgiveness is a joy of the living, not the burden of the dead.” -Junot Díaz, New York Times Book Review (cover review) The novel’s tension derives not from whether Vo Danh will survive the drug war or his past offenses, but whether this spectral man will, in the fullest meaning of the word, live. By the end of The Committed, its cover as a spy novel is blown and its true genre is revealed: It’s a ghost story, if it’s any kind at all. That he happens to be as funny as he is smart is the best plus of all. The novel draws its true enchantment-and its immense power-from the propulsive, wide-ranging intelligence of our narrator as he Virgils us through his latest descent into hell. Fortunately for us, this tormented double agent is back for another serving of ghostcolonial discontent in Nguyen’s showstopper sequel, The Committed. “Equal parts Ellison’s Invisible Man and Chang-Rae Lee’s Henry Park, Nguyen’s nameless narrator is a singular literary creation, a complete original. Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, Time, Washington Post, Minneapolis Star Tribune, Slate, BuzzFeed, CrimeReads, Entropy, and Kirkus Reviews The Sympathizer will need all his wits, resourcefulness, and moral flexibility if he is to prevail.īoth highly suspenseful and existential, The Committed is a blistering portrayal of commitment and betrayal that will cement Viet Thanh Nguyen’s position in the firmament of American letters.Ī New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice 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 follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Sympathizer, which has sold more than one million copies worldwide, The Committed follows the man of two minds as he arrives in Paris in the early 1980s with his blood brother Bon.
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