The narrator himself is anonymous, save for a pseudonym provided near the end of the book and the name on his passport - Vo Danh: literally, “nameless.” As in the earlier book, the anonymity thrusts the narrator into the status of a Vietnamese everyman capable of commenting on the cultural experience of Southeast Asians at home and abroad both during and after the devastating war that caused so much ongoing misery. After arriving in France in 1981, the narrator takes up residence with Man’s aunt, to whom he sent coded correspondence in his former life as a spy, and begins working as a drug dealer for a gangster known only as “the Boss.” The doubling motif can also been seen with “The Committed,” a sequel to author Viet Thanh Nguyen’s 2015 Pulitzer Prize winning novel “The Sympathizer.” The companion volumes exist like one continuous story the new book opens in the exact spot the former ends, with a tiny boat carrying 150 desperate refugees crossing the perilous waters from their departure point in Jakarta.Īmong the refugees is the narrator, who has escaped from a re-education camp in his homeland where he had been imprisoned and tortured by a commissar formerly known as Man, the final third of the trio of childhood blood brothers who also comprise Bon and the narrator.
The cleavages are appropriate for the narrator, a half-Vietnamese, half-French former double agent, whose entire existence - as a man, a spy, an expat, and a refugee - is split between East and West, between two cultures, attitudes, and political realities. 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.Duality is a pervasive motif in “The Committed.” This is apparent from the first pages of the novel, which find the narrator in a psychiatric ward with two holes in his head, “one drilled by myself, the other by Bon, my best friend and blood brother.” The narrator also informs us he is “a man of two faces and two minds” who is “able to see any issue from both sides.” He is a devotee of Hegelian dialectics, a philosophical approach that involves the collision of a thesis and an antithesis to produce a synthesis. The Sympathizer will need all his wits, resourcefulness, and moral flexibility if he is to prevail.
#THE COMMITTED VIET THANH NGUYEN HOW TO#
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.
0 kommentar(er)
