By the end of The Committed, its cover as a spy novel is blown and its true genre is revealed: It's a ghost story, if it's any kind at all.
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That he happens to be as funny as he is smart is the best plus of all. The novel draws its true enchantment-and its immense power-from the propulsive, wide-ranging intelligence of our narrator as he Virgils us through his latest descent into hell.
Fortunately for us, this tormented double agent is back for another serving of ghostcolonial discontent in Nguyen's showstopper sequel, The Committed. "Equal parts Ellison's Invisible Man and Chang-rae Lee's Henry Park, Nguyen's nameless narrator is a singular literary creation, a complete original. Named a Most Anticipated Book by USA Today, TIME, Forbes, O, the Oprah Magazine, Seattle Times, Minneapolis Star Tribune, BuzzFeed, Elle, Entertainment Weekly, CNN, Vulture, Literary Hub, Crime Reads, the Millions, the Week, BookPage, Toronto Star, the Guardian, and Esquire (UK) New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice The Sympathizer will need all his wits, resourcefulness, and moral flexibility if he is to prevail.īoth 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.
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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.