Equally incredibly pretentious and insightfully cinematic sequel to The Symphatizer." We see the character in another chapter of his life, his time in Paris, learning about capitalism. Interesting, but surely not everyone's cup of tea.

It is exciting and superbly entertaining. This well-written work is a must read. As far as the writing style and narration is concerned, it is absolutely fantastic. The way author has wevaed the story with the mastery of writing style and narration, it is truly commendable. Overall, it was a great experience. I highly recommend this work and give it full 5 stars for the writing, narration and overall presentation. Happy Reading.

Didn't enjoy it, sorry. Pretentious, overly political author. More dependent on appeasing those politically sympathetic rather than writing a good, well written story.

Award-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen once again gifts us with a supremely cinematic journey into the unhinged psyche of a spy. These scenes are chillingly vivid and ultimately heartbreaking. Bravo.

A sequel to The Sympathizer. After reeducation in Vietnam, the protagonist finds himself as a boat person in France. He falls into work as a drug dealer for gangsters where he encounters many unpleasant people and experiences.
I read this book because I assumed that The Sympathizer, a Nobel Prize winning novel, must be excellent. They are both well written, but I find my mind wandering in the middle of a page. The books are written from the first person perspective and are mostly stream of consciousness. The narrator encounters some dangerous and exciting events, but the reader is forced to read his disjointed and rambling thoughts. I am not opposed to the literary style, but I am looking forward to reading a book that is not so introspective. I will pass on the third book, if one is published.
Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for providing an advance reader copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I am several months late in getting this review out as it took me a couple of tries to get into. The idea of this book appealed to me, but I had a hard time getting into the plot through all of the stream of consciousness from the main character and the very vivid descriptions of torture. I understand the point is to draw light to things that have happened in history in an impactful way, but it was a bit much for me at times.

This was also presented as a stand-a-alone novel which it can be, but apparently other novels from the author give a better lead into the story and don't plunge you into what feels like the middle of the plot.

I did enjoy the internal / "split" chaos that the main character endured and found his views of the world to be incredibly interesting. Seeing his interaction with different people and some of the apathy he experience at certain situations was eye opening.

Overall, this book wasn't for me but it was incredibly well written and I will definitely be giving this author another try based on that. 4 stars for strong character development, great writing, and being outside the norm of most of the things I read. I would recommend this book for fans of historical/war fiction and action novels.

This is the first book I read of the author, and starts on an interesting premise of a Vietnamese spy among drug dealing French Intellectuals. His blood brother, and few glimpses into his past make it necessary if not imperative to have read the previous book to better appreciate this.

The writing style is good, and turns philosophical in most places on the matters of identity, ideology and commitment. Satirical and dark humor at several places, the pace of the book was too slow, and didn't turn out to be a great page turner.

I’m judging the L.A. Times 2020 and 2021 fiction contest. It’d be generous to call what I’m doing upon my first cursory glance—reading. I also don’t take this task lightly. As a fellow writer and lover of words and books, I took this position—in hopes of being a good literary citizen. My heart aches for all the writers who have a debut at this time. What I can share now is the thing that held my attention and got this book from the perspective pile into the read further pile.

We, the unwanted, wanted so much. We wanted food, water, and parasols, although umbrellas would be fine. We wanted clean clothes, baths, and toilets, even of the squatting kind, since squatting on land was safer and less embarrassing than clinging to the bulwark of a rolling boat with one’s posterior hanging over the edge. We wanted rain, clouds, and dolphins. We wanted it to be cooler during the hot day and warmer during the freezing night. We wanted an estimated time of arrival. We wanted not to be dead on arrival. We wanted to be rescued from benign barbecued by the unrelenting sun. We wanted television, movies, music, anything with which to pass the time. We wanted love, peace, and justice, except for our enemies, whom we wanted to but in Hell, preferably for eternity. ---

And it goes on and on in this stunning brilliant list.

4.3. This is the sequel to the 2016 Pulitzer prize winning novel, The Sympathizer, by Viet Thanh Nguyen. I loved the Sympathizer, which focused on the Vietnam War and it's impact on the Vietnamese, the country, and the "foreigners" in an eye opening way. It was very different from many novels but for me highly impactful and chilling, with unbelievably beautiful prose. The Committed shifts to France in the 1980s where the protagonist is found after leaving from Vietnam and after his allegedly successful "reeducation". Instead of the Vietnam War, among other things, this one primarily focuses on colonialization and it's political ramifications but also delves into the criminal netherworld of Paris as well as the plight of refugees(e.g., their status, discrimination, assimilation and acceptance). In my opinion, one must read the Sympathizer first to truly comprehend this second novel, although some reviews are mixed on that.
We meet again, the protoganist, half-Vietnamese and half-French, who refers to himself as “a man of two faces and two minds.”. He is self-identified as Vo Danh (which literally means "Nameless"). Similar to The Sympathizer, the writing and prose is simply breathtaking and extraordinary. It is a very dense book, and not easy to read, yet I had difficulty putting it down. This, like The Sympathizer, is not for the lighthearted nor in any way close to an easy or beach read. It has a political bent, as the first one, but this one focuses on colonization, communism, revolution, and capitalization, and the impact and consequences of the colonized turning into the colonizers--some of the many contradictions in this novel.
The Sympathizer was chilling, and although this book is very good, the first one was definitely better but this is still an incredible work. I received this book from NetGalley in exchange for a candid and unbiased review.

This was a really great read. I couldn't wait to get stuck in and it certainly did not disappoint. The Committed is much anticipated sequel to Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer! Here our protagonist relocates to France where he begins to work for a crime boss there. It is action packed and past paced jumping from story lines concerning guns and drugs and the likes. The underworld of Paris is explored in realistic, spine shuddering detail at times. The United States and Vietnam are never forgotten though and we know that the seedy sides of all of these nations are always connected in some way. Nguyen is such a wonderful writer. He is a master storyteller, so very accomplished. His language at times is deep and his referencing of other writers and theorists often requires a second reading, but I found it fascinating all the same. If you were a fan of The Sympathizer, you will certainly enjoy this read also! Take your time and savour every word. It really is a masterpiece. I am looking forward now in anticipation to the third installment.

When I first saw that the author is preparing a sequel to The Symphatizer and it is available on netgalley to request, I didn't think twice and hit the button!
It came as a surprise when netgalley actually approved my request and I started immediately to read it

To be honest, I had high expectations even though I kept telling myself that a sequel will not exceed The Symphatizer novel, and to my surprise...I was right
But let me get to it

The Committed is an intense, sometimes a humorous exploration of the complexities of politics emanating from the colonial experience of Vietnam, and the post consequences the war is leaving on human minds. While the action of the novel is located in France, the book addresses experiences in Vietnam and the US as well. The political education comes largely from the thoughts and words of the main character, "a man of two faces and two minds."
The action that does take place is sometimes hard to follow, narrated as it is through those "two minds," but the focus isn't so much on that action as it is on the complex circumstances, both political and personal that led to the present

The book is describing Paris and the left-wing intellectuals, the humour and darkness of the criminal world the narrator finds himself in, the portrayal of the Vietnamese diaspora and the contradictions thrown up by their feud with a French-Algerian gang.

At the heart of it is the narrator's continuing struggle with his identity, neither French nor Vietnamese, his loyalties stretched in every direction
The frustration was that at times the stream of consciousness becomes repetitive, the stories of his childhood, his confused identity and the way every event is seen through that perspective

Some parts felt like I was reading an essay with a bit of fiction thrown in for good measure. It was still interesting, of course, but not the reading experience I expected
At one point he starts referring to himself as 'we' which confused me a lot

To be fair, I am still recommending this book if you want to find more answers and get lost in the thoughts of the main character
Many thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for proving me an ebook version of this book #thecomitted

Viet Thanh Nguyen has done it again! He’s created an engrossing sequel to The Sympathizer in The Committed. He has traded in the world of spies and the Vietnam conflict in the 70s for the world of gangsters in Paris in the 80s. Our (still) unnamed narrator has abandoned communism for capitalism, joining a Vietnamese drug running gang involved in a turf war. The wordplay in this novel is extraordinary. The second guessing, questioning, internal conflict and emotional whiplash are still present. Though the ending brings relief, you will want more, and I think there’s room for a trilogy.

"Self-criticism? I cried. I am nothing if not self-critical! My entire life is a self-criticism session between me, myself, and I! No need to raise your voice, said BFD. If you are so self-critical, said the Maoist PhD, do you see where you deviate from the masses? Why should I worry about deviating from the masses when I am also me and myself? Am I not a mass? Am I not already a collective? Do I not contain multitudes? Am I not a universe unto myself? Am I not always infinitely dialectical as I synthesize the thesis of me and the antithesis of myself?"

Although Viet Thanh Nguyen's "The Committed" is a sequel to "The Sympathizer" it definitely stands out on its own as a novel; engaging, well-written and impactful.

In the follow-up to his Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Sympathizer, Nguyen further follows the story of a Vietnamese refugee (who now claims the name in his passport is Vo Danh - but this only means "anonymous" in Vietnamese). Short recap: The protagonist fled Saigon during the 1975 spring offensive, used to live as a spy in the US trying to infiltrate Hollywood, ended up in a Vietnamese re-education camp where he, a communist, was tortured by his own allies, then spend time in an Indonesian refugee camp. Now it's 1981, he is 36 years old and flees to France, the country of his father. By his side is his blood brother, a mirror image of himself. Both join a Vietnamese organized crime and prostitution syndicate that gets entangled in a gang war with Algerian criminals. The narrative clue, of course: Algeria and Vietnam were both colonized by France (French Indochina, French Algeria).

Our protagonist is an unreliable narrator, the voice and the perspective keep changing, thus reflecting the mental torment propelled by trauma and circumstance: "He could see that I had a screw loose, the trusty screw that had, for years, held together my two minds." This idea goes back to the phenomenon of "double consciousness" as described by W.E.B. Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk and refers to the experience of looking at oneself through the eyes of others, as well as the tension between heritage and dominating culture. No wonder the motif of the mask also features in Nguyen's novel (see Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks).

And there's really a lot of postcolonial and other philospohical theory interwoven in the text in order to discuss the topic of identity and the commitment to ideologies and belief systems: Theodor W. Adorno, Louis Althusser, Simone de Beauvoir, Walter Benjamin, Aimé Césaire, Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva, Jean-Paul Sartre, Voltaire et al. - plus a parody of Bernard-Henri Lévy. And don't forget that there's also the possibility to belief in nothing - what does that men for a person?

In the idea of the "Fantasia" culture show, Nguyen also questions the concept of authenticity. The author himself fled Vietnam by boat when he was four years old, then was flown out to the US from a US military base to a refugee camp in Pennsylvania.

The Committed can be read as a stand-alone book, it combines genre writing and satirical humor with a novel of ideas / a political novel, thus melting high-brow and low-brow literature into one. Nguyen does not take sides, but questions everything. In an interview with the wonderful Tommy Orange, Nguyen said that there will be a third and final installment to the series, set in the US.

You can learn more about the novel (or rather its translation, Die Idealisten), in our new podcast episode (in German).

Published by Grove Press on March 2, 2021

The Committed is a sequel to the The Sympathizer, a novel Tzer Island highly recommends. The narrator of The Sympathizer is half French, half Vietnamese. He was a communist spy in South Vietnam who fled to the United States during the fall of Saigon. He survived a Vietnamese re-education camp after returning to Vietnam, where he wrote the confession that is The Sympathizer. He ends that novel as a refugee.

In The Committed, the narrator — still nameless but known to most as “the crazy bastard,” although he reinvented himself as Vo Danh and later as Joseph Nguyen, joining his baptismal name with the most common surname in Vietnam — has made his way to France with his friend and blood brother Bon, a committed anti-communist who does not know that the narrator betrayed their pact by becoming a communist. When Bon and a third blood brother, Man, reunite with the protagonist at the novel’s end, their discussion of Vietnamese communism and American or French imperialism makes clear that ideology makes little most difference to people who are dodging bullets and napalm, as important as it might be the ideologically committed.

The reeducation camp taught the narrator that “dedicated communists were like dedicated capitalists, incapable of nuance.” Conflicting ideology is one of the many forces that drive The Committed. The narrator tells us that his greatest talent is the ability to see every issue from both sides, to appreciate the contradictions that are fundamental to ideology and to life itself. He accepts that Bon can be both “a devout Catholic and a calm killer,” a slayer of communists. The title suggests this ambiguity: a crime can be committed and confessed; you can be committed to a cause or to an asylum. The narrator is a communist who lives as a capitalist, selling hash and later a harder drug he calls “the remedy.” He speaks fluent French and, although he is not accepted as a Frenchman, he is admired by the French for his fluency, proof that their imperialism in Vietnam paid dividends. Imperialism is a political theme that surfaces again and again as the narrator contemplates the fate of Vietnam and its people.

The second novel, like the first, is written as a confession. The narrator has a lot to confess, despite being “a nobody who believes in nothing.” The Committed, however, begins with the news that the narrator is dead, killed by Bon, the inevitable outcome of the protagonist’s ideological betrayal of his blood brother.

Given the protagonist’s ability to write a second confession after his death, it is no surprise that the death is metaphysical. Late in the novel, the narrator describes himself as “a dead man whom others seem to think is still alive.” Perhaps he describes himself as dead because he believes he should be dead, that his life has no worth. The novel’s penultimate chapter arrives at a climactic moment that explains why the narrator might have concluded that he is dead at Bon’s hands.

While the plot ultimately surrounds the narrator’s fragile relationship with his blood brothers, it begins by describing his relationship with his aunt, a fellow communist who sponsored the narrator’s departure from a refugee camp. The aunt is a devoted communist and thus despised by Bon, but when the narrator begins to sell hash, she is enough of a capitalist to demand a cut of the profits.

His drug dealing serves another refugee, a Vietnamese of ethnic Chinese ancestry who is known as the Boss. The Boss was a black-market profiteer in Vietnam who reestablished himself as a shady businessman in France. The Boss operates from an Asian restaurant that is a front for his criminal enterprise. He uses the restaurant employees, Le Cao Boi and the Seven Dwarves, to expand his business from the Asian ghetto to the whiteness of central Paris. The narrator uses the Boss to advance the theme that “Asian” is a complex mixture of ethnicity and culture, despite the French and American tendency to see Asians as a single blended product. The narrator's relationship with the Boss, like many of his relationships, will end violently.

Viet Thanh Nguyen is among the greatest prose stylists in modern American literature. He rivals Nabokov in his mastery of English as a second language. His juxtaposition of highbrow language with slang creates a lyricism that is all his own. The Committed continues the acute observation of detail that made The Sympathizer so memorable. Here is his description of the Boss: “Now he was clad in loafers, creased slacks, and a polo shirt, the casual wear of the urban, Western branch of homo sapiens, his trimmed hair parted so neatly one could have laid a pencil in the groove.”

The story occasionally devolves into rants and lectures about the narrator’s grievances. The grievances are justified, but there is a certain degree of redundancy in their telling. The plot breaks down from time to time when grievances are aired, but this isn’t the kind of book that depends on a conventional plot for its value. It is instead a book worth reading for its truth.

The narrator’s ultimate realization after exposure to a lifetime of violence, after considering that “history’s wheels are oiled by blood,” is that violence makes us “feel like men but behave like devils” while nonviolence “instead of making us mirror images of our colonizers . . . could break the mirror altogether and liberate us from the need to see ourselves in the eyes of our oppressors.” The novel’s ending might be seen as ironic in light of that belated epiphany.

The boldness of Nguyen’s prose and the themes of his narrative are less startling after reading The Sympathizer. Had I read The Committed without reading The Sympathizer, I would have again been struck by its freshness. Viewing the novel as a continuation of The Sympathizer seems like the fairest way to rate it, but since the novel stands alone, and since I did read it as a sequel, I think it deserves a rave Recommended but doesn’t quite earn the Highly Recommended I gave to The Sympathizer.

RECOMMENDED

This book blew me away, especially the lyrical prose that managed to be beautiful and not portentous. The author wrote beautifully because he cares, and not because he is trying to impress and this sincerity comes through. I highly recommend it

The much anticipated sequel to Nguyen’s The Sympathizer! We follow our unnamed protagonist as he relocates to France and starts working for an underground crime boss.

Like it’s successor, there’s sex, guns, drugs and a whole lot of action. This time we explore the seedy life of Paris, while still pondering about the US and Vietnam.

Nguyen is an amazing writer and storyteller — he references many authors and philosophers, writes with heavy descriptions and use of word plays. So it could be hard to grasp at times.

If you enjoyed The Sympathizer, you’ll enjoy this one too! This took me a while to read as did the first, but still excited for the last of the trilogy. Thank you Grove Atlantic and Netgalley for the arc!

I enjoyed The Sympathizer, but couldn’t get into The Committed. I kept putting it down and finally gave up around 16%. The pacing was too slow for me and there was too much buildup that I didn’t enjoy.

The Committed is a sequel to The Sympathizer, which I haven't read, but has been on my TBR. But, I was told that you can read The Committed without first reading The Sympathizer and I found that to be COMPLETELY TRUE! Now I am going to go back and read everything by Viet Thanh Nguyen.

The Committed stars the same protagonist as The Sympathizer, a Vietnamese man who has survived the Re-education camps during the Vietnam War , worked as a spy, escaped to America and now, in this book, relocates to Paris, France. It's the 1970's and our un-named protagonist starts working for a crime boss who runs a Chinese restaurant as a front for his criminal activities. In the seedy underbelly of Paris, immigrants from former French colonies such as Vietnam and Algeria make their lives. There's sex & drugs, guns & action. But at the same time there's plenty of pondering about France's colonization of Vietnam and America's involvement in the war. There is also a lot of clever contemplation about race and identity. It's a high action, philosophical, literary read. Two thumbs up.

Interesting commentary from a Vietnamese War perspective. There was so much going on with undercover spies, assassinations, sympathizers in America.