Tragedy and comedy blend awkwardly in this novel’s second half. In these writings, the running dogs of capitalism are walked on long intellectual leashes. The introduction of these French intellectuals, as well as the narrator’s own reading, allows him to brood over the revolutionary ideas of Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, Marx, Sartre and others. It’s the kind in which a bouncer at a brothel reads Voltaire. Infecting France with Eastern drugs is his own tidy form of payback. Thanks to the French Vietnamese woman he calls his aunt, who works in publishing, he has access to left-wing French intellectuals, who have a strong taste for his products. The man of two minds becomes a drug dealer. If it’s not a total breakdown, it’s something close. The second half of this book is shaggy, shaggy, shaggy. More often I was reminded of George Balanchine’s comment that if his dancers didn’t occasionally fall onstage, they weren’t really going for it, and of John Coltrane’s emotionally overblown notes in “A Love Supreme.” The overwriting in this novel only rarely bothered me. The author dispenses aperçus: “Even among the unwanted there were unwanted” “Ah, contradiction! The perpetual body odor of humanity!” “Colonization is pedophilia” “My entire life is a self-criticism session.” One bad guy considers himself “Baudelaire with a baseball bat.” Vietnam, in terms of its past with the French and the Americans, comes to seem like a strip of land passed over annually by hurricanes. The Vietnamese pound their cognac, in macho fashion, while the French prefer to sip. Nguyen riffs on what he calls the “dialectical baguette.” The Vietnamese improve the French bread by fashioning it into banh mi. Nguyen’s narrator is a sophisticated tour guide into what he calls “the heart of whiteness.” French intellectuals love jazz, he writes, “partially because every sweet note reminded them of American racism, which conveniently let them forget their own racism.” This book subtly draws upon the mythic power France once held for Black Americans. They’ve been “shaped by their hand and touched by their tongue.” The very word colonialism “sounded better when dubbed la mission civilisatrice.” The narrator is contemptuous of French gentility but attracted to it as well. It searches for a heterogeneous ideal, not a homogeneous one.Įven those Vietnamese who despise the French have been seduced by them, Nguyen writes. This is a book about humiliation, about repression and expression, about the plasticity of identity. 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.The heat in “The Committed,” of which there is a good deal, derives from the friction created by the narrator’s contradictory thoughts about France, his country’s colonizer. The Sympathizer will need all his wits, resourcefulness, and moral flexibility if he is to prevail. 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. A highly presentable signed first printing of The Committed, the long-awaited follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Sympathizer, which has sold more than one million copies worldwide, ABOUT THE COMMITTED: The Committed follows the man of two minds as he arrives in Paris in the early 1980s with his blood brother Bon. Bound in full black paper over boards, with spine lettered in gilt. Light shelfwear to unclipped dust jacket. First Edition, with full number line indicating first printing. Signed by Viet Thanh Nguyen to page specially bound-in by the publisher.
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