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The Committed (The Sympathizer Book 2) Kindle Edition
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
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. The pair try to overcome their pasts and ensure their futures by engaging in capitalism in one of its purest forms: drug dealing.
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. 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. 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. The Sympathizer will need all his wits, resourcefulness, and moral flexibility if he is to prevail.
Both 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.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherGrove Press
- Publication dateMarch 2, 2021
- File size1667 KB
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Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
Review
“The conflicted spy of Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Sympathizer returns, embroiled in Paris’s criminal underworld . . . The pages are rife with prostitutes, drugs, and, in the late pages, gunplay. But, as in The Sympathizer, Nguyen keeps the thriller-ish aspects at a low boil, emphasizing a mood of black comedy driven by the narrator’s intellectual crisis . . . Nguyen is deft at balancing his hero’s existential despair with the lurid glow of a crime saga. A quirky intellectual crime story that highlights the Vietnam War’s complex legacy.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Call The Committed many things. A white hot literary thriller disguised as a searing novel of ideas. An unflinching look at redemption and damnation. An unblinking examination of the dangers of belief, and the need to believe. A sequel that 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
“The Committed is nothing short of revelatory . . . This book is fierce, and unrelentingly good. Hilarious and subversive, philosophical and hallucinatory, it is much more than a sequel, more like a necessary appendage in a brilliant and expansive anti-colonial body of work. Bravo.”—Tommy Orange, New York Times-bestselling author of There There
“This follow-up to his seminal The Sympathizer is Nguyen at his most ambitious and bold. Fierce in tone, capacious, witty, sharp, and deeply researched, The Committed marks, not just a sequel to its groundbreaking predecessor, but a sum total accumulation of a life devoted to Vietnamese American history and scholarship. This novel, like all daring novels, is a Trojan Horse, whose hidden power is a treatise of global futurity in the aftermath of colonial conquest. It asks questions central both to Vietnamese everywhere—and to our very species: How do we live in the wake of seismic loss and betrayal? And, perhaps even more critically, How do we laugh?”—Ocean Vuong, New York Times-bestselling author of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
“The Committed, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s furious and exhilarating sequel to The Sympathizer, is part gangster-thriller, part searing cultural analysis of the post-colonial predicament, seen through the eyes of a Vietnamese-French mixed race bastard double agent. Paris of forty years ago swirls to life around him, from intellectual salons to filthy toilets—with glimpses of everyone from Johnny Hallyday to Frantz Fanon to Julia Kristeva. Like Ellison’s Invisible Man, these novels will surely become classics.”—Claire Messud
“An elegy to idealism, Orientalism, and existentialism in all its tragic forms, Nguyen’s novel doesn’t so much inhabit early eighties Paris, as it pulls the plug on the City of Light. Think of The Committed as the declaration of the 20th ½ Arrondissement. A squatter’s paradise for those with one foot in the grave and the other shoved halfway up Western civilization’s ass.”—Paul Beatty
“The Committed is a wonderful successor to The Sympathizer, a splendid tapestry of a novel, full of dubious but richly realized characters. It solidifies what we already know—Viet Thanh Nguyen is a gifted storyteller. It is difficult to know where to start with the praise. The characters have a sad and often tragic complexity, and the language offers a terrific ride for the reader. This is a grand novel full of breathtaking and luminous insights and a pure joy to read. Anticipation is why we come to a book, and joy is why we keep turning page after page. The Committed offers both, and so very much more.”—Edward P. Jones, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Known World
“The Committed is a rich and exhilarating story of friendship, loyalty, and greed. Set in 1980s Paris, it follows the characters from The Sympathizer as they try to fashion new lives among all the wretched of the earth. Viet Thanh Nguyen gives us an unsparing look at the poisonous effects of ideology—whether colonialism, communism, or capitalism—even as he explores the deep-seated need we all have to believe in something. A deep, compelling and humorous portrait of how we are shaped by fictions others have for us.”—Laila Lalami, author of The Other Americans, finalist for the National Book Award
Praise for Viet Thanh Nguyen:
“One of our great chroniclers of displacement . . . All Nguyen’s fiction is pervaded by a shared intensity of vision, by stinging perceptions that drift like windblown ashes.”—Joyce Carol Oates, New Yorker
“A layered immigrant tale told in the wry, confessional voice of a ‘man of two minds’—and two countries, Vietnam and the United States.”—Pulitzer Prize Citation for The Sympathizer
“Remarkable . . . His book fills a void in the literature, giving voice to the previously voiceless . . . Compares favorably with masters like Conrad, Greene, and le Carré . . . An absurdist tour de force that might have been written by a Kafka or Genet.”—Philip Caputo, New York Times Book Review (cover review), on The Sympathizer
“Intelligent, relentlessly paced and savagely funny . . . The voice of the double-agent narrator, caustic yet disarmingly honest, etches itself on the memory.”—Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal, “Best Books of the Year,” on The Sympathizer
“A fast-paced, entertaining read . . . A much-needed Vietnamese perspective on the war.”—Bill Gates, Gates Notes, on The Sympathizer
“Extraordinary . . . Surely a new classic of war fiction . . . I haven’t read anything since Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four that illustrates so palpably how a patient tyrant, unmoored from all humane constraint, can reduce a man’s mind to liquid.”—Ron Charles, Washington Post, on The Sympathizer
“We’ve never had a story quite like this one before . . . Mr. Nguyen is a master of the telling ironic phrase and the biting detail, and the book pulses with Catch-22-style absurdities.”—Sarah Lyall, New York Times, on The Sympathizer
“Beautifully written and meaty . . . I had that kid-like feeling of being inside the book.”—Claire Messud, Boston Globe, on The Sympathizer
“Thrilling in its virtuosity, as in its masterly exploitation of the espionage-thriller genre . . . The book’s (unnamed) narrator speaks in an audaciously postmodernist voice, echoing not only Vladimir Nabokov and Ralph Ellison but the Dostoyevsky of Notes from the Underground.”—Joyce Carol Oates, New Yorker, on The Sympathizer
“Gleaming and uproarious, a dark comedy of confession filled with charlatans, delusionists and shameless opportunists . . . The Sympathizer, like Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, examines American intentions, often mixed with hubris, benevolence and ineptitude, that lead the country into conflict.”—Jeffrey Fleishman, Los Angeles Times, on The Sympathizer
“Dazzling . . . A fascinating exploration of personal identity, cultural identity, and what it means to sympathize with two sides at once.”—John Powers, Fresh Air, NPR, “Books I Wish I’d Reviewed,” on The Sympathizer
“As a writer, [Nguyen] brings every conceivable gift―wisdom, wit, compassion, curiosity―to the impossible yet crucial work of arriving at what he calls ‘a just memory’ of this war.”―Kate Tuttle, Los Angeles Times, on Nothing Ever Dies
“Nguyen’s lucid, arresting, and richly sourced inquiry, in the mode of Susan Sontag and W. G. Sebald, is a call for true and just stories of war and its perpetual legacy.”―Donna Seaman, Booklist, on Nothing Ever Dies (starred review)
“A beautiful collection that deftly illustrates the experiences of the kinds of people our country has, until recently, welcomed with open arms . . . An urgent, wonderful collection that proves that fiction can be more than mere storytelling—it can bear witness to the lives of people who we can’t afford to forget.”—Michael Schaub, NPR Books, on The Refugees
“This is an important and incisive book written by a major writer with firsthand knowledge of the human rights drama exploding on the international stage–and the talent to give us inroads toward understanding it . . . It is refreshing and essential to have this work from a writer who knows and feels the terrain on an intellectual, emotional and cellular level–it shows . . . An exquisite book.”—Megan Mayhew Bergman, Washington Post, on The Refugees
“Confirms Nguyen as an agile, trenchant writer, able to inhabit a number of contrary points of view. And it whets your appetite for his next novel.”—Michael Upchurch, Seattle Times, on The Refugees
“A short-story collection mostly plumbing the experience of boat-bound Vietnamese who escaped to California . . . Ultimately, Nguyen enlarges empathy, the high ideal of literature and the enemy of hate and fear.”—Boris Kachka, New York, on The Refugees
“The book we need now . . . The most timely short story collection in recent memory . . . Throughout, Nguyen demonstrates the richness of the refugee experience, while also foregrounding the very real trauma that lies at its core.”—Doree Shafrir, BuzzFeed, on The Refugees
About the Author
Product details
- ASIN : B085FP3VT1
- Publisher : Grove Press (March 2, 2021)
- Publication date : March 2, 2021
- Language : English
- File size : 1667 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 410 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #39,862 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Viet Thanh Nguyen was born in Vietnam and raised in America. He is the author of The Committed, which continues the story of The Sympathizer, awarded the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, alongside seven other prizes. He is also the author of the short story collection The Refugees; the nonfiction book Nothing Ever Dies, a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award; the children's book Chicken of the Sea, with his son Ellison and with Thi Bui and Hien Bui-Stafford; and is the editor of an anthology of refugee writing, The Displaced. He is a University Professor and the Aerol Arnold Professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California and a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur foundations. He lives in Los Angeles.
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These books, beginning with The Sympathizer, create the deep and insightful character who walks through the Vietnam War as a secret agent to everyone, a man with two sworn beliefs that contradict each other both politically, culturally, personally.
Surviving relocation, re-education, interrogation...he manages to make it to the U.S., where The Sympathizer begins, and his internal struggle continues.
This is the best book illustrating the Vietnamese situation within the war I've ever encountered, written with weight, beauty and complexity.
We are gifted by such writers as Viet Thanh Nguyen.
In ‘The Sympathizer,’ the nameless man’s double nature prompted him to embark on the covert mission of taking back the South Vietnamese homeland, yet in his double agent role as a communist he was really fighting on the side of his handler, Man, yet at the third (and real?) level, he was attempting to save Bon, Man, and, if possible, himself, in a futile, absurd, suicidal mission.
In the sequel, ‘The Committed,’ published in 2021, we see that the nameless narrator has survived physically, but his mental state has deteriorated.Either as a result of his reprogramming or simply as a coping mechanism, the Sympathizer’s double nature has multiplied into many points of view:
‘I am able to see any issue from both sides, and while I once flattered myself that this was a talent, now I understand it to be a curse. What was a man with two minds except a mutant? Perhaps even a monster. Yes, I admit it! I am not just one but two. Not just I but you. Not just me but we.”
After escaping from reprogramming and torture, the Sympathizer becomes a refugee again, this time landing Paris in 1981, the home of his French father. No longer an active communist or double agent, he gets sucked into a drug and prostitution ring and lives with his communist aunt. He sells hashish, which seems to be as much a part of the French intelligentsia’s daily diet as their wines, and thinks of cornering the market in selling hashish to the ones that can afford it He also partakes of ‘the remedy’ i.e. cocaine, more than is good for him as well as the business.
Nguyen takes every opportunity to satirize the French through his Sympathizer. In Parisian clubs and brothels, even a bouncer (whom the Sympathizer refers to as the “eschatological muscle”) is familiar with Sartre but prefers Fanon and Cesaire. The Sympathizer actually acknowledges the commonality between himself and the Algerian “muscle,” as they are both non-white and both have been “colonized” by the French.
The narrator does attempt to take a moral stand and is willing to risk his life when “the Boss” orders him to interrogate and torture one of the Algerian dealers from a rival drug ring. The narrator has given him a nickname—Mona Lisa—based on his inscrutable smile rather than his gender. Identifying with him, as he did with the Algerian bouncer, as a fellow non-white colonist, the Sympathizer instead asks him questions about his background. Seeing that he has not tortured him enough, the Boss gives him a hammer and orders him to bash the prisoner’s brains in.
In a scene modeled after the torture scene in the film, ‘Reservoir Dogs,’ complete with dancing interrogator, also containing allusions to the historically inaccurate Russian roulette scene in ‘The Deer Hunter, the Sympathizer is finally forced to confront the moral answer to the question Tolstoy most famously posed, “What is to be done?” At least once in his life, the Sympathizer wants to choose the moral high ground rather than be rendered impotent by his two-sided nature. In an clear revelation, he sees that the obvious answer to “What is to be done?” is “Nothing!.”
This is the moral hill he is prepared to die on. Due to an absurd chain of events, the Boss and his henchmen are dispatched and the Sympathizer’s life is spared. I will not describe the details of how this comes about, not only because it would be too lengthy but because I am not certain, like the Sympathizer himself, that it is really happening. That is one of the flaws of the novel. When we are not sure whether we are on the solid ground of consensual Reality, we are uncertain of Everything. While this shifting ground is unsettling, it does firmly place us in the state(s) of mind of this schizophrenic narrator.
The various meanings of the word “committed” are explored in this novel. The narrator is asked if he is committed to the correct political or social cause, depending on who is asking the question. He is asked what crimes he has committed. Finally, due to the splintering of his personality, he is committed in the literal sense to a hospital called ‘Paradise’ and ordered to write his second confession (the novel ‘The Sympathizer’ being his first.) When a brothel is called Heaven and a rehab hospital called Paradise, I am not too inclined to insist on literal, allegorical, or metaphorical meanings. I recall the New York Times review of ‘The Committed’ in the quote, now twice removed, from the another critic summarizing one of Billy Wilder’s last films, “Flawed and bonkers, but I like it.” If he can end a review on that note, then I should be able to as well.