The Committed explores questions around identity from different angles than The Sympathizer. At best, Nguyen’s writing is funny, searing, insightful, and heartbreaking.

The Committed veers into experimental fiction territory, and I love seeing Nguyen’s experiments. Nguyen does really interesting things with form, perspective, and sentence construction (for example: an epic seven-page sentence). Viet Thanh Nguyen is also a master of word play: just as our narrator can look at people and situations from a variety of perspectives, so too can Nguyen observe and utilize the various facets of a word.

Thank you to NetGalley and Grove Atlantic for the digital ARC of The Committed.

(CWs include drugs, gang violence, prostitution, racism, and sexual violence)

Incredibly thrilling and poignant, but I hadn't read the author's first book, "The Sympathizer" yet and was a little confused. I went back and read that, loved it, and then came back to this...and then LOVED it. I had so much more appreciation for the philosophy and the conflict. Brilliant author, brilliant writing, but I definitely recommend reading his first book first!

This rich and compelling book is a literary novel, a political thriller, a story of betrayal, a tale of refugees, a novel of empire and the collapse of empire, a novel of ideas and ideology, a story of crime and immigration and love – there is just so much here to enjoy and reflect on. It starts in 1981, 2 years after the narrator has fled Vietnam by boat. No longer welcome in Vietnam or the US where he murdered two men to protect his cover as a spy, he goes to France, along with his blood-brother Bon, with whom he was placed in a brutal re-education camp. Bon’s mission in life has now become to kill all communists but has no idea that the narrator used to be one. This is only one of the problems they face in establishing themselves in France, where they are soon drawn into the murky and violent underworld. I found this a truly exhilarating wild-ride of a novel, brilliantly written, a mix of wit and erudition and ideology and ideas and even humour, all thrown at the reader page after page, making this one of the most absorbing books I have read in a long time.

I really loved The Sympathizer, so to read The Committed and be approved by netgalley was a bit of a gift. It's almost like reading a slow spiral of watching someone become unhinged. Nguyen seems to know exactly how to write these types of characters and situations. And honestly, I'm here for it.

4/5 Stars

A fairly manic sequel to 'The Sympathizer' which takes the French-Vietnamese narrator from Southern California to Paris. Low-rent gangster antics take up his days, while politics suffuses his thinking, with long discursions about Frantz Fanon, the schizophrenia of the colonized, and the hypocrisy of French racism (especially in the scene where he explains the French love of jazz this way: "every sweet note reminded them of American racism, which conveniently let them forget their own racism"). Goes a little off the rails more than once, with the narrator escaping by the skin of his teeth with pulp-fiction luck and at one moment seeming to land inside a John Woo movie. Still, the pulsating energy and razorblade smarts show Nguyen operating as a novelist very much worth watching.

Many thanks to NetGalley and the publishers, Grove Press, for sending me this novel for review.
If a reader is expecting a conventional story then he is bound to be disappointed. The narrator of his earlier novel, The Sympathizer, returns after imprisonment at a re-education camp run by the mysterious Man. When the protagonist who takes the name of Vo Danh—which means nameless or anonymous—and his blood brother, Bon, arrive at Paris, the reader guesses that all will not be hunky dory for the pair from the welcome they receive from the airport officers at passport control. Vo Danh, whose father is a French priest and mother Vietnamese, is convinced that he has a right to be in Paris. He is no longer a spy or a sleeper but a spook. He is a man of two minds and, hence, has the rare ability to sympathise with conflicting situations. This makes him an unreliable narrator which Nguyen exploits very successfully. Though Vo Danh is an ardent communist he is quickly transformed by the world of capitalism and becomes a drug dealer selling hashish to his aunt’s intellectual friends.
What is most interesting is the philosophy and the various asides which are present in the book. Politics and philosophy are carefully interwoven but to make the reading less academic, the author introduces several witty comments about French society. Just when you feel that you have had enough of philosophy through references to Camus, Simone de Beauvoir and Sartre, the author adds an amusing anecdote and humor to enliven the situation and keep the reader going. Especially memorable in the incident where Vo Danh steps into dog excreta and comments that this would never happen in Vietnam as they eat their dogs.
The novel is a scathing criticism of colonialism and the treatment of diaspora whether Vietnamese or Arab. Nguyen’s descriptions of place are breath-taking and one feels one is present in the landscape whether it is the relatively beautiful side of Paris or the disgusting toilets which Vo Danh has to clean with very limited resources to do the job
Most of the novel transpires in the mind of Vo Danh. It considers the impact of French colonialism on the Vietnamese. At one level, the protagonist hates his coloniser, at another he can’t help but admire the French. But are the French more civilized than the Vietnamese, Nguyen seems to ask? The Vietnamese have successfully converted the French baguette of which they are so proud into bahn mi, he adds in his usual tongue in cheek manner.
Thought provoking and well written, but not an easy read.

As usual got thanks to NetGalley

Apparently this book has a non direct prequel which it explains why I felt like I was missing something out of it, like when you go out with a couple and are talking about things that you understand but the context is something you cannot share, because you are not part of the couple, so that's how I felt mainly with it.


That being said is a really good book, despise that I couldn't immerse myself totally on the story I really enjoyed it, the author is brilliant and has a pen that many people would and rightly so, envy. He is a really talented author that at least to me left me thinking and evaluating political and philosophical ideas.

I have a few friends that love this kind of readings and definitely I will force them this book because is really good. I highly recommend this book for those who are more into "adult" stories.

This book is brilliant, and I am not. I loved it anyway. How many ways are there to express the degree to which we are committed? I almost wrote, "to which one is committed," but the narrator of this book is "a man of two faces and two minds ... able to see any issue from both sides." He is not 'one', he is broken in two. Events from Viet Thanh Nguyen's prequel novel, "The Sympathizer," have led this unnamed narrator to this duality. They have led this former Vietnamese soldier and spy to France along with his blood brother Bon. In the 1980s Paris unknown to tourists and cameras, he flips his former communist script to a capitalist script, wherein he makes his living dealing hashish. I've read reviews of "The Committed" that suggest it is a standalone novel, that Nguyen provides enough back story to understand this novel on its own. I do not recommend this. To me, the two books are a two-novel set. And they require a commitment from their readers -- a commitment doubly worth the effort.

{Thanks to NetGalley and Grove Press for the advanced reader’s copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.]

How exciting to be back in the world of Viet Thanh Nguyen's nameless protagonist. I was thrilled when granted an ARC to this sequel to Pulitzer-prize-winning, "The Sympathizer".

This serves as a great account of the Vietnamese living in post-war France. The trials and tribulations that ensue through the eyes of the protagonist.

Overall, I enjoyed this - but to be expected, not as great as the first novel. I realize the immense pressure that must have come with writing this. The author did a fabulous job, but I would only recommend as a supplement to the first book.

Thank you to NetGalley for this advance reader copy!

Definitely recommend reading the Sympathizer first, although they are very very different books. This one reads like stream of consciousness and I was semi frequently confused, I did, however, find this definitely worthy of a read. It didn't live up to the Sympathizer for me, but it was still GREAT

The unnamed narrator (TUN) of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s standout novel The Sympathizer returns in an equally outstanding sequel, The Committed. After incarceration at a reeducation camp run by the Masked Man and then living at a refugee camp, TUN and Bon, blood brothers since childhood, travel as refugees to Paris.

TUN is keeping secrets from Bon, his closest confidante. Not only does he know the identity of the Masked Man, he himself was a communist spy, and it’s Bon singular objective in life to kill communists. However, he pushes asides those concerns to take advantage of a more immediate opportunity. His new master, the Boss, deals drugs, and his aunt an editor, maintains connections with Paris intellectuals. The possibilities of this new market make capitalism too tempting to ignore.

While this sets up significant tension—confrontations with rival gangs, keeping his past from Bon, and hoping the Masked Man doesn’t appear in France, the important work of the novel happens in TUN’s inner monologues. The reeducation camp dismantled TUN's delicate dance keeping up a false front, and now he is having a crisis of identity, likely heightened by his forest into drug dealing (and sampling of the product). Set in the early 1980s, this considers the impact of French colonialism and The American War as well as the Vietnamese diaspora.

You might think the book has a serious tone dealing with these topics, but instead utilizes a sense of absurdist humor.

The novel is incredibly interesting and rewarding and I recommend it, but do think it’s a more challenging read that requires concentration. Nguyen often uses very long sentences which in themselves aren’t hard but require attention. The multiple layers of symbolism and wordplay—from the myriad meanings of “committed”—mean this would benefit from a second reading. Because the book is so compelling, the prospect is welcome, and I know I will discover many things I missed on first read.

You do not need to have read The Sympathizer to pick up The Committed, though I recommend reading both books.

I loved this book. Viet's writing style is as subtle as it is strong, their use of description both concise and eloquent. This book is a must-read for anyone who is already a fan, or anyone looking for a new-to-them OwnVoices author. The Committed is an inimitable work of fiction for our times.

This novel is narrated by a double spy for South Vietnam and North Vietnam who is living in Paris after a stint in America. He turns to drug dealing to supplement his income along with his blood brother Bon. There are many references to his time in a reeducation camp and how he and Bon survived. Bon is an David anti communist while the narrator is a revolutionary, which comes to a head when the third blood brother, also a revolutionary, comes to Paris late in the book. The novel is full of philosophy which was interestinghow it interfaced with the action in the story. Apparently this novel was a sequel to another novel by this author which I had not read but I think it stood alone quite well. There was a lot of interesting information about Imperialism on France’s part as well as America’s. There was too much philosophy for my enjoyment and I thought the story dragged in places..

“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”

The unnamed “man of two minds” from Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Sympathizer returns in The Committed (Grove Atlantic, 2021), now entangled in the criminal side streets of France. No longer a spy or a sleeper, but most certainly a spook, our two-minded narrator is tormented by contradiction, infinitely dialectical in his ability to sympathize with conflicting perspectives. Set against the noir backdrop of 1980s Paris, Nguyen’s long-awaited sequel is something between a thriller, philosophy, and a ghost story, confronting the dark red stain left on the narrator by colonialism and the Vietnam War. Unflinching in tone, ambitious, witty, subversive, and profoundly haunting, The Committed challenges an America that hears “Vietnam” and thinks of “napalm, and burning girls, and bullets to the head.”

Our narrator is the son of a French priest and Vietnamese mother, who, in “The Sympathizer”, spied on the anti-Communist refugees in America for the North Vietnamese. Us readers of The Committed find him and his brother Bon after they have fled re-education, fresh-off-the-boat in Le Gaule, ie. Paris, i.e. City of Light, i.e. the Fatherland. It’s at these pearly gates that the narrator assumes the name Vo Danh, which literally translates to “nameless”—a word printed on Vietnamese gravestones for the unidentified victims of war. His half-French identity makes this arrival in Paris a homecoming of sorts, a return to the savage and seductive hand of the metropole. Trying desperately to outrun their pasts, Vo Danh and Bon turn, naturally, to capitalism’s most shiny enterprise: drug-dealing. Vo Danh pretends to be a waiter with Bon at “the worst Asian restaurant in Paris”, selling hashish to his aunt’s intellectual friends. Never mind the obvious moral contradiction—he is, after all, a man of two minds, as divided as the 17th parallel.

Unlike the United States, which flaunts its parasitic legacy with a certain swagger, the absoluteness and subtlety of the French mark on the Vietnamese diaspora is something of extreme discomfort for Vo Danh. As the son of a Vietnamese father who first sought refuge in France, I found Nguyen’s prose particularly incisive in investigating this relationship. “Loving a master who kicks you is not a problem if that is all one feels,” Nguyen’s protagonist writes, “but loving and hating must be kept a dirty little secret, for loving the master one hates inevitably induces confusion and self-hatred.” Vo Danh is a victim of a political Stockholm syndrome, a product of minds whittled into subjugation from years at the lycée. Ring the French bell of civilization and liberty and we drool like Pavlov’s dogs. Here in Paris, this self-hatred turns into rivalry among the post-colonized, evidenced by the escalating drug war between the Asian and Arab gangs.

The biggest conflict in this story, however, has nothing to do with the politics of drug dealing, but rather the spectral war of his past which haunts all the exiles of the world alike. Nguyen swiftly backgrounds the actual incidents of the novel—the rival narcotics war, the pageantry of Fantasia: a Vietnamese show of song and dance, visits to a prostitution ring—while simultaneously foregrounding Vo Danh’s narration. The result is a postcolonial voice as fastidious as Proust, as embodied as Césaire: “My life as a revolutionary and a spy had been designed to answer one question… WHAT IS TO BE DONE?”

It’s this voice that allows Nguyen’s multitudinous narrator to speak as the collective, honoring the shared memory of the Vietnamese diaspora. As he does in The Sympathizer, Nguyen gives us point of view shifts, fragmenting Vo Danh’s narration from first-person to second-person to first-person plural perspectives. But even when speaking as the singular “I”, Vo Danh is speaking as the “we” inside “I”, the nameless and interchangeable colonial body that has long been degenerated by Western eyes.

Unable to extricate himself from the shackles of his past, Vo Danh must contend with the philosophical contradictions that haunt all colonized peoples—communism vs capitalism, violence vs nonviolence, pilgrim vs refugee, him vs himself. He must, too, try to reconcile his two closest friends, whose politics place them at opposite ends of an ideological battlefield. Vo Danh bares his teeth at the ‘Repressive State Apparatus’ and colonialism—isn’t that commitment to revolution enough? Can one choose a side in the revolution’s theatre of the absurd? How can we affirm life in the red aftermath of brutality and violence?

The Committed is too smart to answer these questions—but don’t mistake this for ambivalence. As Nguyen writes it, there is, too, a resistance even in the narrator’s most sympathetic tendencies, even in doing nothing. If dual-mindedness can be described as a lukewarm compromise, the narrator’s rejection of the political binary is resistance at its most fiery, stubborn, realized development.

*Thank you to Netgalley and Grove Atlantic for providing me with this eARC in exchange for my honest opinion.

This is the follow-up to “The Sympathizer,” a novel that won the Pulitzer, in which a Communist spy goes undercover after the fall of Saigon, then finds himself in a Communist re-education camp. In “The Committed,” the spy has escaped and is headed to Paris, where he joins a gang of drug dealers. It’s possible to read this as a stand-alone, as I did, without having read “The Sympathizer.” Although I will definitely be going back to read the first novel now!

I read this slowly, over a period of weeks, because I needed time to digest it. This doesn’t strike me as a book you could, or should, read in one sitting. Nguyen’s writing is truly bold and unique: it includes fascinating flights of thought amidst slick espionage and the humorous and self-deprecating internal musings of the narrator.

Nguyen himself, as a child, escaped Vietnam with his family in 1975. Through his writing, he works through the experiences of refugees, as well as the failings of both capitalism, which works hand in glove with imperialism, and communism.

This novel also includes, I believe, a sentence that is over 600 words long and grittily rapturous, weaving through a violent encounter and escape that turns into a drug-fueled journey, both humorous and sublime, that metaphorically travels from the individual identity, to the collective, to a high-flying recognition of the Buddhist concept that all is one, and back again to the hardened and familiar feeling of isolation.

I can’t do the writing justice with my silly little summary, so please, just read the sentence -- and the novel -- for yourself. But please go in prepared, knowing that although Nguyen is painting with a full pallet that includes humor and heartbreak, action and suspense, this is first and foremost an exploration of philosophical notions around ideology, identity, war, memory and humanity.

Thank you Grove Press for the ARC!

It's a hard job to write a sequel on a book that won a Pulitzer Prize, but Viet Thanh Nguyen did exactly that. The Committed picks right up from where the Sympathizer left off. This book is a brilliant work of art, philosophical, beautiful..... and brutal. The dark themes combined with the intelligent and beautiful writing was a nice twist, as always.

But honestly, I'm just not the reader for this series. I got tired of the long speeches. I am more of a reader for the plot and action, than for the writing and descriptions. To me, it will definitely be a book I won't forget, but I'm not sure if I needed to remember it, either.

This was a really fascinating read. I enjoyed it a great deal, even with how almost stream of consciousness it felt (which is something I'm not typically a huge fan of) and the chapters of some difficult to fully digest at once prose. But the philosophies and politics, the nuances, and commentary on society and the humans residing within these worldly constructs were wonderfully blasted in the reader's face. I admit to audibly reacting multiple times to the hard truths and at least somewhat "controversial" opinions the author beautifully wrote in The Committed. There is nothing shy about The Committed.

Although this book is a lot of meaty content around politics, religion, philosophical pondering, etc. it is also focuses on interpersonal relationships in a way that felt refreshing to me. The way the story come together at the end, especially, took my breath away. Bon, Man, and Crazy Bastard's brotherhood and the final act of their bonds brought on a torrent of emotions. This is all capped by how people of diaspora, oppression, and war already have it difficult in the world. And I don't know what to say yet about the ending.

Overall, I feel satisfied with this book and happy I took the time to read it. There are definitely sections in the middle that were a little painful to get through and the writing style is not what I am used to or typically prefer, but all of that can be put aside when we inspect the cores of the story.

Although Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Committed, the follow up to his 2016 Pulitzer Prize-winning The Sympathizer, is more experimental, ambitious and unwieldy, it might be better. It’s funnier, equally surprising and more suspenseful. What’s certain: this is the best one-two literary punch ever, a wordy left-right combination to the gut and the head. I’m already looking forward to the third installment of The Sympathizer Trilogy.

The Committed, out tomorrow, stands alone, but since it continues the story, which started during the Fall of Saigon, following our suffering hero to Los Angeles and back to Southeast Asia, I recommend reading The Sympathizer first, as the ghosts of the first pervade the second.

Our unnamed narrator has survived a tortuous reeducation camp and it is two years later, 1981, when he narrates from France—with a bullet lodged in head—his new life living with his friend Bon at his Aunt’s chic, Parisian apartment. No longer a double agent working for the communists, he nevertheless plays both sides as he and Bon wiggle their way into the Parisian immigrant Vietnamese gangster community. A restaurant job leads to drug-dealing which infringes on the Algerian-French hashish territory. The resulting tension is delivered with sardonic panache from our despondent hero, and then old ‘friends’ from Los Angeles appear and complicate matters.

Political talk abounds and it’s not just name-dropping but full-on philosophical debates re: Edward Said, Henry Kissinger, Albert Camus, Pol Pot, Simone de Beauvoir, Franz Fanon. Pop culture references—ye-ye music, Bruno Magli shoes, Sony Walkman’s—not only serve to remind us which decade we’re in but showcase capitalism’s long pervasive shadow in his fight to re-claim his socialist ideology. The War in his head never ceases.

When talk of feminist deconstructionist Julia Kristova commences you understand the PoMo phô Nguyen has poured down your throat.

This is Literature with a capital L, but do not be intimidated. Just when the anger and self-pity the narrator bags around begins to trip up the reader, a plot twist or chase scene ensues.

Mostly, it’s Nguyen’s sentences that twist and turn like a Faulkner road and make one marvel.

Wow! This book was so good. I was nervous to find out that this book wasn't going to be as good as the first book, but it was so much better than the first book.

(full review found at michigandaily.com and more informal notes on goodreads)

From my goodreads:
- I'm putting together a longer, more polished review for the Daily but here are some thoughts that probably won't make it into that review. I think the Sympathizer is a sexual assualt survivor. I may be misreading but that was my interpretation.

- one of many great quotes: "Besides, the French and hte Vietnamese shared a love for melancholy and philosophy that the manically optimistic Americans could never understand. The typical American preferred the canned version of philosophy found in hot-to manuals..." p11

- Cultural supremecy/inferiority -- tactics on various sides the the cultural capital aisle p63

- Nguyen is great with IMAGES. the "Boat people" the "EIFLE TOWER"

note: the sympathizer constantly judges and weighs other cultures, making exacting statements that catagorize them. But this tendancy to catagorize and catalouge gets weaponized against him. Hence, his vanity.

- Mommy xo/Oedipus complex / "Issues with women"

- History as a series of entertwining narratives / valid but overwhelming, ultimately gets flattened bc its too vast too immense to percieve