The Committed
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4.4 • 7 Ratings
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- £4.99
Publisher Description
'A voice that shakes the walls of the old literary comfort zone' New Yorker
'Goes toe to toe with the original then surpasses it. A masterwork' Marlon James, Booker Prize-winning author of a Brief History of Seven Killings
'Fierce and unrelentingly good. Hilarious and subversive' Tommy Orange, New York Times bestselling author of There There
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It's the early 1980s and the Sympathizer arrives in Paris. As a refugee, he and his blood brother Bon try to escape their turbulent pasts by turning their hands to capitalism in one of its purest forms: drug dealing. No longer in physical danger, the Sympathizer is both charmed and disturbed by Paris. Falling in with left-wing intellectuals and politicians at dinner parties held by his French Vietnamese "aunt", he finds customers for his merchandise as well as stimulation for his mind. But this new life he's living has unforeseen dangers of oppression, addiction and the seemingly unresolvable paradox of reuniting his two closest friends, men whose world views stand them poles apart.
The highly suspenseful sequel to The Sympathizer, both literary thriller and brilliant 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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. 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. Vo Danh starts selling hashish for a Viet-Chinese drug lord called the Boss, whom he and Bon met in their refugee camp. The gig has him more vexed about the crime of capitalism than that of drug dealing, and he's not expecting a turf war. Indeed, he's chagrined to discover his rivals, French Arabs who share with him a legacy of colonization, want him dead. Meanwhile, there are opportunity for socializing, revenge, and reunions at the Vietnamese Union. 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. Not just I but you. Not just me but we"). 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. Nguyen continues to delight.
