The Committed

By (author) Nguyen Viet Thanh; Read by Chau, Francois
Short description/annotation:
The Committed is the long-awaited sequel to the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Sympathizer
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.

Review quote:
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.
Review quote:
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?
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A brilliant rollercoaster of ideas and action.
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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.
Review quote:
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.
Review quote:
The Committed is nothing short of revelatory . . . This book is fierce, and unrelentingly good. Hilari