No Name has no luck on that score, and Viet treats readers to an ambiguous ending. No Name has the opposite commitment, keep Man alive, and hope two closely held secrets aren’t revealed. Bon knows Man’s coming, and Bon has committed to killing him. Speaking of Man, he returns on a fated mission that serves to drive up No Name’s angst levels. Readers will encounter lots of the latter, but don’t despair, because No Name has developed a very sharp sense of black humor that makes your reeducation go down easier than Man’s brand. Three things readers will find in abundance: blood and guts, as in wholesale bloodbaths sex, sexual longing, sexual musing, sexual objectification, and sexual debauchery and political philosophizing, as in Camus, Sartre, and Fanon, revolving around the destructiveness of colonialism and the oppression imposed by victorious revolutionaries. He does, however, pull himself up with the indirect help of his sophisticated committed communist aunt, who intellectualizes with French socialists who enjoy French capitalism he becomes their drug supplier, building his book of business with his Chinese gang. You can’t get lower than No Name, as exemplified by his job in the worse Asian restaurant in Paris, as toilet cleaner. In Paris, Bon and he settle into a life of crime, the kind of business available to outcasts like Vietnamese, as well as Algerians and Arabs, the victims all of French colonialism, and, of course, distinctive in hues of yellow and brown. Yet, this level of commitment proved inadequate thus reeducation camp. Remember that No Name himself was so committed to communism and the North’s cause that he worked undercover as a spy in the ARVN, following the General to the U.S., where he continued. With these two as men to whom you have committed yourself, Bon the committed communist killer and Man the committed communist commissar, it’s no wonder No Name exists in a constant state of confusion dosed variously with nihilism, absurdism, and good old existentialism. He reunited with his blood brother Bon, after writing endlessly in his other blood brother’s reeducation camp, Man. The Sympathizer has returned, now in the Paris of 1981, as burdened as ever with his many dualities and in an even greater state of confusion. 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. 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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