The Committed is the 2021 follow-up to Nguyen's Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Sympathizer, but in all honesty, these books could be/should be read as a single volume. The cohesive themes make it impossible to pick up The Committed as a standalone, but allow for The Sympathizer to be incredibly deepened by reading its followup.

A few notes. I'm not sure I'm smart enough-- or ever could be smart enough-- to unearth all of the points that Nguyen puts forward in this text. At its heart, it's a book about colonialism, hidden under a veil of a gangster narrative. Like The Sympathizer, our narrator has a wry sensibility and surrounds himself (on purpose or accident) with philosophers-- even if they wouldn't consider themselves that way. The plot meanders a bit, but as a reader I was so rooted in the voice, I couldn't help but want to follow (even when I couldn't 'follow' every argument). This book is not, nor does it advertise itself to be, light reading, and the violence in every meaning of the word could put off some readers.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for the ARC in exchange for my honest review.

This follow-up to “The Sympathizer” is another crime novel filled with lots of ideas that focus in large measure on the complex legacy of the Vietnam experience. Along with his blood brother, Bon, Nguyen’s protagonist has fled Vietnam for his father’s homeland. They are now refugees in Paris. His former choices, both good and bad, don’t seem to matter much here where moral ambiguity is so prevalent. His Parisian setting gives Nguyen a platform to highlight the crime, violence, racism, prostitution, and drugs so prevalent in the West under capitalism while also questioning the oppression and brutalization of the Vietnamese people under French colonialism, the American intervention, and the Communist regime. Clearly, he sees both capitalism and communism as deeply flawed ideologies with little to offer but war and cruelty.

The Sympathizer and his blood brother, Bon, crash with his French Vietnamese aunt (really no relation) only to be introduced to her intellectual friends and to the French underworld with jobs at “the worst Asian restaurant in Paris.” Since the latter is really only a front for illegal drug dealing, the refugees are enlisted to develop a new clientele among his “aunt’s” intellectual acquaintances. Of course, this leads to the classical drug turf war and the usual violence that comes along with it. The plot is highly convoluted, frequently odd, incredibly violent, and often quite opaque, but Nguyen redeems it with lots of dark comedy that drips with irony.

Indeed, the thriller aspect of the novel is not really very prominent. Instead, Nguyen devotes large amounts of space to French philosophy and his protagonist’s questioning of his own commitments and betrayals. Notwithstanding markedly slowing the pace, these digressions give the novel a literary power absent in most crime genre fiction. Matters include his secret role as a communist spy, his torture at the hands of another friend in a post-war reeducation camp, his identity as an Asian minority, and especially his betrayal of Bon, a staunch anti-communist who lost his wife and child in the war.

I read this right after reading The Sympathizer so I was still riding that high and I wanted to continue on with the Captain who is now a Crazy Bastard or just simply rather crazy.

This one is a mix of crazy action and long philosophical asides. I must admit that I got rather lost in the 'asides' as Nguyen was in a dialogue with philosophies, ideologies, which I am not on point with so I could not really join into that dialogue.

If I had a wish for this book it would be that I wished for a better balance between action and philosophy after all the proof of words is when it's made out into flesh that is action. I wish this particular baby had not been lost in the philosophical bath water.

But for all this I was fully on board with the Captain and his struggles with nothing and contradictions which seem to be a universal condition, and life in general. It's a pity that he has for the moment abdicated from joining us in this world and has decided to fall down the rabbit hole that his thoughts have dug up.

An ARC gently provided by author/publisher via Netgalley.

It's hard to follow a first act like the Sympathizer, which won a Pulitzer Prize, but this story continues the story, following the narrator to Paris after the Vietnam war and after time in a "reeducation center" in Indonesia. At times brutal but at times florid, it works only fitfully.

It’s been 4.5 years since I read Viet Thanh Nguyen’s forerunner to The Committed, the Pulitzer Prize winning The Sympathizer, and my memories of that first book are somewhat vague. I know, however, that this new book picks up exactly where the first one left off and it is probably better to think of this as one book in two volumes rather than two separate books. Indeed, thinking of it that way is important to the plot of the book as this new one develops.

Looking at my Goodreads review of The Sympathizer isn’t a lot of help because it is a bit short and lacking in detail. It does however remind me that I was not sure about the first half of the book but very impressed with the second half.

Sadly, only half of that last sentence is true for The Committed.

As The Committed begins, The Sympathizer aka Crazy Bastard travels to Paris and becomes a drug dealer working for The Boss (not Bruce Springsteen) who is, basically, a gangster running an organised crime and prostitution syndicate. This sets the scene for one of the two main narrative strands of the novel: a story of gang turf wars involving kidnapping, torture, murder, orgies and all kinds of unpleasantness.

The other main component of the book is, as a rather strange bedfellow for the first, what amounts to a thesis on colonialism and Marxism. The two narrative threads are so closely intertwined that gangsters will sometimes even almost break off from a gunfight to discuss philosophy.

I think it is simply that I am the wrong kind of reader for this kind of book. The gangster stuff with the silly nicknames, unfunny jokes and rather too much toilet humour (literally) felt immature, especially when laid alongside, or mixed with, a textbook on colonialism. And the ideas presented in the theoretical side of the book need someone with a lot more background knowledge than I have for them to make proper sense or to be enjoyable (whatever that means in this context). I think an editor would have been useful to trim down this part and maybe find a way of including some introductory comments that allowed more people to engage with it.

I couldn’t help noticing a sentence that said, ”Your entire life reeled forth in paraphrase, in summary, sometimes elliptically, you being in such a rush and there being so much to say, bits a pieces of your autobiography as haiku and epigraph and fragment…”and thinking “Now, there’s a book I’d like to read”.

As it is, this one was a struggle. The final few pages of the book provide the most food for thought and were actually my favourite bit, but I almost didn’t get that far.

"The Committed" by Viet Thanh Nguyen is a novel about an unnamed main character's trials and tribulations during his move to and current time in Paris in the 1980s. This book is a blend of literary fiction, thriller, a bit of mystery, and almost a bit of philosophy. "The Committed" follows the unnamed main character, a former Communist sympathizer, as he attempts to make it in Paris as a capitalist within the confines of now living in the nation that once colonized his home country of Vietnam. This was filled with a lot of twists and turns that I did not expect in terms of the characters and the plot and provided a literary analysis of capitalism, colonization, and racism. It definitely makes me want to read the author's previous books as others commented that it provides some background information to help make sense of "The Committed."

Finally, a writer that can really write!

I was unfamiliar with Viet Thanh Nguyen's work even though his debut, and Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Sympathizer, sits on my bookshelf, unread. Well, that will change as I was hooked by Viet Thanh Nguyen's first well-crafted sentence in his sequel: The Committed.

" We were the unwanted, the unneeded and the unseen."

There is a poetry to the writing that is lacking in other more obvious crime writing, It also made me wonder, surely this isn't translated so superbly? But no, it was written in English. Even though the author was born in Vietnam, he is an American writer yet one that can see America from the outside, (his anti American rants and misanthropy in general reveal a sort of no mans land mind at work). This lends itself to the duality in our protagonist, who more than once, hints at a split self. This is the thinking man's Jack Reacher, a playfully philosophical action man.

The writing was absolutely superb, darkly funny and also effortlessly juggles the macabre with the cerebral. Our nameless protagonist has (several) existential crises before our eyes, whilst kicking assailants out of his way, dealing drugs in his Japanese tourist disguise and frequenting Paris's worst Asian restaurant (as a toilet cleaner). We learn of his propensity to burst into tears, a side effect from the re-education camps. The history of Vietnam is interwoven into the drama. One downside though is that there was also an awful lot of fight scenes and while I admired the pace and detail at the start, I found it hard to sustain my enthusiasm. But overall this was a brilliant read by a fantastic author.

Initial fears that about having not read the prequel, and the author's debut, The Sympathizer, were abated. This absolutely works as a stand alone too.

The first part is entitled: Me. We never learn our narrator and protagonist's name, in fact he jokingly called himself vo danh (which means nameless) and he is often referred to as "crazy bastard," the closest we get to a name. It's about how him and his blood brother Bon get used to life in France after surviving a reeducation camp even remarking how the delight of French baked goods helped him to regain all the weight he lost in the camp.

Part 2 is Myself where we get deeper into his reflective self, where he is haunted by the ghosts of the men he's killed, but in a mocking, almost religious way. There are literary tricks, such as redacted text when people talk about him in Chinese and he can't understand, we talk about white flight but in France, and he dabbles with the French intellectual scene, a Maoist PhD, a budding politician and his aunt's humourless lawyer lover-friend. We discover his penchant for whiskey and brutality but he's less of a womaniser than a typical crime novel anti hero, presumably because this is a literary thriller not just because he can't because of trauma linked to the reeducation centre. There are other brilliant lines:
"Inside every prostitute is an accountant: Unfortunately that was your free one."
(she said disdainfully after he fails to perform)
His boss's frustration when he is taking too long to interrogate someone:
Why am I paying you for this shit? Are you writing his biography?

Then right in the middle of the book, it says THE END and towards the end, his self splits and the other side of him narrates the story to him (called you). It's the first convincing 2nd person narration I've witnessed and in the hands of an unreliable narrator, was genius.

The writing is a good mix of light and heavy, humorous with themes of race, racism, immigration, refugees, war, politics, culture, secrets, etiquette are all dealt with, often at length and cameos by the Mona Lisa, the Beatles, and many more.

Viet Thang Nyugen is a Vietnamese born American academic and Marxist whose 2015 debut novel – “The Sympathizer” won the Pulitzer prize as well as a host of other prizes and nominations. I came to it late (in 2017) – when it was Dublin Literary Prize shortlisted and at the same time as the publication of his short story collection “The Refugees”.

I have to say I preferred “The Refugees” – which was very surprising to me, as generally I much prefer novels to short story collections, but I found “The Refugees” more nuanced, revealing and intriguing, whereas in "The Sympathizer" the interesting themes were swamped by the (to me) implausibly wide range of different and rather bizarre scenarios experienced by the single narrator (dramatic evacuation from Saigon just before its fall, undercover spying, assassinations of communist sympathizers in America, post-war mission into the Vietnamese borders, detailed torture scenes both as perpetrator, accomplice and victim and above all a rather bizarre intermission as a type of cultural advisor to an apocalyptic Hollywood Vietnamese war movie). I also reflected that I am perhaps of a generation (born very late 1960s) and nationality (UK) where the Vietnam war simply does not have the same cultural resonance as it seems to have for other readers.

This book is an almost direct sequel to “The Sympathizer”. After a brief (and I have to say very strong) section on the refugee boat where our narrator was left in the first novel, the remainder of the book is set in Paris. There he (and his blood brother) Bon (still fiercly anti-communist and entirely unaware of the narrator being a double-agent) join a group of Vietnamese gang members and start dealing drugs on their behalf among a group of French Marxist intellectuals.

I think it is pretty well essential to have read the first to appreciate the second – although you do not have to re-read it as the book contains plenty of references back to the first book and the key plot elements.

The author has commented that he felt there were two key reasons for writing a sequel.

The first was that he had deliberately chosen to write the first novel in a spy/adventure genre – where series/sequels are very common – and he had genre justification for simply continuing the adventure.

The second was that “I wanted to write a dialectical novel with The Sympathizer and to write a novel deeply influenced by Marxism and Marxist theory.” and to explore ideas such as “what does [a] disillusioned former revolutionary do with himself?” and to have his narrator confront both: of the legacies of both: French colonialism (something not really examined in the first novel – which concentrated more on American imperialism); sexism – the blatant sexism and sexual abuse which accompanies wars and revolutions and in which the narrator was increasingly complicit in the first novel (his torture by his own side and own friend being largely down to his not preventing the rape of a communist spy so as to protect his undercover alibi).

And I think that the two motivations for the book serve as almost a perfect introduction to this novel – which is effectively a blend of violent, sex-obsessed action thriller and Marxist/colonial theory

Pretty well the entire book consists of:

- Gangster action (mainly drug dealing, silly nicknames, “medieval” torture, tit-for-tat killings between an Asian and Arabic gang – both of course importantly victims of French Imperialistic state-exported violence in Vietnam and Algeria, visits to spectacular brothels, and multiple profanities – many in capital letters, different type sizes or both)

- Interspersed with discussions of colonial/post-colonial/Marxist/literary/philosophical theory (at least a a nodding familiarity with Adorno, Althusser, Cesaire, Fanon, Gramsci. Ho Chi Minh, Rosseau, Voltaire and so on is fairly crucial to the novel)

With just as you think this is a schlock-novel, you are suddenly thrown into some philosophical discussion on say the brutalising effect of colonisation on the colonised; and just as a discussion of Marxist dialectics might make you think the book is a lecture, a torture scene cut short by a fire-fight or ended with a visit to a spectacular brothel livens things up

The effect is I have to say 100% Pulp Fiction – a film I once enjoyed, but when I was a lot less mature – and which is no longer my taste in films and certainly not literature.

So overall not really for me – despite a strong finishing section where our narrator – now in an asylum for his sanity and protection discusses two key themes to the book – the different meanings of the title and the concept of the importance of nothing and non-action in someone jaded by their opposites.

In his sequel to the Pulitzer Prize winner, The Sympathizer, Viet Thanh Nguyen continues the unnamed captain’s story to France, where he begins working essentially for the Vietnamese equivalent of the mob in Paris. The unnamed narrator struggles with his identity much as he did in The Sympathizer, as both a communist and now as a capitalist. This book is a deep reflection into the human mind, but specifically a subconsciousness that has been tortured.
I didn’t enjoy this book, per se. These novels are tough, with vivid descriptions of issues I’d much rather not think about (including an in-depth, multiple page description of the narrator having a bowel movement and the return of the squid from the first book). At the same time, the author’s social commentary is superior, written in unique prose that works. The discussions regarding colonization are particularly relevant to today’s society. I highlighted numerous sentences due to the wordplay. I especially appreciated the use of both first person and second person narration, highlighting the captain’s mental instability.
I wouldn’t recommend this book to everyone. Some of the writing is inaccessible and difficult to follow, as well as some highly theoretical discussions. However, if you enjoyed The Sympathizer, read this book. The positive elements from the author’s first novel are present in this story.

Thank you to NetGalley and Grove Atlantic for a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

This follow up to The Sympathizer packs a wallop and I'm not even sure that I experienced it to its fullest. The main character lands in Paris, enters into the drug trade, and spends a lot of time within his thoughts and memories. The run-on sentences give a clear sense of where the narrator's mind is at, but the thoughts themselves are often twisted, philosophical, tormented, and drugged. There is action, but there is also a lot of pontificating on subjects including colonization, oppression, communism, violence, and more. My only wish is that I had re-read The Sympathizer before reading this because there were probably connections that I missed because of the time that has elapsed between reading these two books.

This was such a great read. I don't think I started to understand what was happening until a third of the way through, but once I settled into the rhythm of Nguyen's writing I was hooked. I read the Sympathizer but I enjoyed this one much more.

I’m fairly new to this ARC reviewing lark and I certainly did not expect to be granted the sequel to Pulitzer-prize winning ‘The Sympathiser’, a book that I loved (although I can still never look at a squid the same way again.) I also thought Viet Thanh Nguyen’s ‘Refugees’ was so good that I put it on a school course last year.

So, what a pleasure to have the chance to read this a couple of months earlier than most. And for the most part, it was such a joy to be back in the world of Nguyen’s nameless half-Vietnamese, half-French bastard, in all his duplicitous duality. Once again, the author writes with his particular intellectual verve: every page dripping with the irony and lyricism that made ‘The Sympathiser’ such a standout. Where that book was framed around American imperialism and Vietnam’s ruptured self, as brilliantly characterised through the narrator- a communist spy nestled amongst anti-communists- ‘The Committed’ moves the action (and inaction!) to Paris. This relocation allows Nguyen to cast his skewering eye on the French instead- both in terms of their treatment of the large Vietnamese community living there and, of course, their years of colonial occupation in ‘Indochina’. .

The narrator- the eponymous sympathising/committed Crazy Bastard who doesn’t know whether he is a capitalist or a communist, a loyalist or a traitor, a believer of everything or nothing, is blessed/cursed to be able to see any issue from two sides and, so, in honour of this quirk, I’m going to appraise this book in the same way:

The Great:
- Nguyen is one of the wittiest, smartest writers today and his prose is razor-sharp, inventive and often hilarious. He renders serious, weighty topics with hilarity whilst retaining thoughtful insight. There is a complex Matryoshka doll of intellectual layers here that is rather impressive.
- The narrator is haunted by the ghosts of the first book and I loved their interjections and presence at key moments in this one. His instability and unreliability as a narrator is creatively conveyed through shifts in narrative perspective, pages-long run-on sentences and recursive, looping thought patterns. He remains a compelling creation.

The Less-Than-Great:
- I have to admit that around half way I began to seriously struggle with the book and its lengthy digressions and diatribes. It’s hard not to see this as more of an experimental treatise on postcolonial theory rather than a satisfying narrative, one that contrives a plot in order to expound on its communist/capitalist/nihilist/existentialist (et al) ruminations.
- Some of Nguyen’s quirks became a little tedious in places: the lack of character names, ironic wordplay and political disquisitions, for example, made the reading experience a rather ponderous one in the latter stages.

Committing to a final evaluation then: whilst I sympathise with Nguyen’s intentions and remain appreciative of his remarkable talent, I did not enjoy this as much as its predecessor. I think it could have done with some heavy pruning: 100 pages could have been lost here without adversely affecting the ‘story’. I will still read absolutely everything Nguyen ever writes but I’m afraid this one didn’t go down quite so well as his previous works.

Thanks to @netgalley for this eARC, given in exchange for an honest review.

3.5 Stars.

Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel, “The Committed”, continues the story from his Pulitzer Prize winning first novel, “The Sympathizer”, about a Vietnamese national who was a dual-agent during the war. “The Sympathizer” was a wonderful book focusing on the insanity of the war and the difficulty encountered by our Sympathizer who sees both sides of the conflict and comes to view himself as two different people, especially after being tortured in a re-education camp by one of his childhood best friends.

“The Committed” follows the half-French Sympathizer to Paris as a refugee where he becomes involved in drug dealing for an organized crime gang. He soon is immersed in corrupt local politics and capitalism. The book deals with numerous complex and thought-provoking topics including French colonization, communism vs. capitalism, loyalty and commitment, oppression of women, cultural ambiguity and post-traumatic mental health. Philosophical discussions along with textual references take place between the two personalities of the Sympathizer adding to the depth and complexity of this book.

The story assumes that the reader understands the events from the first book so I’d recommend it only to those who have already read “The Sympathizer”. While the book is beautifully written and provides historical insights, it’s more intellectually challenging to read than his first book, should only be tackled by those who feel committed.

Brilliant and important book that I believe people will be discussing forever. I reviewed this with a rave for AARP magazine.

This book has the same main character as the author's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel "The Sympathizer". It is a fascinating crime story that is well-written and quick paced. You do not have to read the previous book to enjoy this one, I highly recommend this novel. The unnamed protagonist is engaging and interesting. This book brings his brother into the story as well.

This book follows The Sympathizer, as the protagonist has now moved to Paris to live. His primary connection in Paris is the woman who was his "handler" when he was a communist spy infiltrating the anti-communist Vietnamese group in the United States. His life as a double agent became more complicated, as he was ordered back to Vietnam where he wound up being tortured in a "reeducation camp" by one of his two oldest friends, who knew all along that he was actually a double agent for the communists. Meanwhile, his other oldest friend is a staunch anti-communist, and believes that our protagonist is firmly on his side. Just to complicate matters, he begins supporting himself as a drug dealer in Paris, thus embroiling himself with a group of Vietnamese gangsters.

The central issue in this book is, I think, what it means to be "committed" to something - how do you choose a side, and stick to it. Our protagonist seems to be unable to choose a side, and the ties of friendship and his history pull him in both directions. Meanwhile, many of the characters ostensibly take a side, but then appear mostly motivated by money, power, etc., regardless of ideology.

I wonder if this book, in some ways, is a metaphor for the country of Vietnam itself. A Vietnamese friend once told me that the trouble with the Vietnamese is that "we don't know who we are." Vietnam has such a long history of repeated invasions by other countries that it seems to be almost defined by who it is "against" at any given time.

I enjoyed reading this book. It was well written, and it gave me much to think about.

Thank you so much for the opportunity to read this book. I'll be posting my review on Goodreads and Amazon

Thank you #NetGalley for providing me with an ARC of Viet Than Nguyen’s #The Committed.
First, while not necessary, I urge you to read Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize winning The Sympathizer, which is the predecessor to #The Committed. When I saw that #The Committed was being released , I honestly didn’t know if it could contain the same intensive drive and emotional power as the first book. Not only does it, in sheer narrative punch it, at times, surpasses it. Telling a chilling tale of the aftermath of the Viet Nam War and one particular nameless refugee, #The Committed is both believable and brutal. Delving into the world’s never ending war of right vs. wrong and good vs. evil, our no named protagonist finds himself in Paris and it’s environs searching for answers to these questions while trying to survive and make sense of his very conflicted life. This quest makes #The Committed a thoroughly engrossing book and one I’m glad not to have missed. I encourage you to make this journey too.

3.5, rounded up. A sequel to Nguyen's Pulitzer-prize-winning [book:The Sympathizer|23168277], with which it shares some of the same strengths and weaknesses. Here, the Sympathizer, aka Crazy Bastard, has survived a Viet Cong reeducation camp and an Indonesian refugee camp to wash up in Paris in the early 1980s, adopting the disguise of a Japanese tourist to sell hashish and heroin to haut-bourgeois Marxists as an accomplice of a Vietnamese exile organized crime and prostitution syndicate, based in "the worst Asian restaurant in Paris," in the midst of an escalating turf war with an Algerian drug-trafficking network.

Lots of half-clever in-jokes along the way: a thinly-veiled version of the insufferable French TV intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy appears as a character named BFD, and one of the main clients is an aging soixante-huitard known as "The Maoist PhD."

But the promotional copy is overselling this as a postmodern "intellectual thriller," with shades of Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs and Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Cercle Rouge. Really, this is a work of postcolonial theory scaffolded with allusions to classic action movies, but you really have had to have taken a graduate seminar to closely engage with these ideas, let alone find them enjoyable.

Like The Sympathizer, The Committed needed an editor to prune away 100 pages or so, and having a Pulitzer means having final cut. But rather than baroque plotting, this one is overstuffed, far past the bursting point, with exhaustive (and exhausting) ruminations on the ideological impact of French colonialism in Indochina, Algeria, and Africa, as characters (and the narrator) stop the action for lengthy disquisitions on Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, Althusser's Repressive State Apparatus, Adorno, Derrida, Gramsci, and Julia Kristeva.

Still, The Committed is a master class in narrative voice and unreliable narrativity, as Nguyen channels the inner monologue of a divided and fracturing consciousness. The Crazy Bastard is a passive protagonist, running in recursive looping spirals of reliving past traumas from the previous novel (which I should probably have reread first), haunted by the ghosts of the men he's killed before, and facing the dilemmas of communism vs. capitalism, the ridiculousness of French racism and the futility of postcolonial liberation, with a nihilistic shrug. And as our narrator's consciousness fragments and downshifts from the first into the second person, the whole impossible machine just derails in the denouement, set in a strange limbo between life and death.

Thanks to Netgalley and Grove Atlantic for providing an ARC, in return for an honest review.

I am once again in awe of Viet Thanh Nguyen's writing, wordplay, and his ability to pack so much into his prose. The writing and narration style changes somewhat in this book, and there's several places where second person narration and page long run-on sentences are used. These devices are used to illustrate the altered mental state of the Captain following the events in THE SYMPATHIZER. I can see how these could be a turn off for other readers, but I felt that they did a good job at depicting the character's instability.

THE COMMITTED expounds on many of the same themes as THE SYMPATHIZER, but with a greater emphasis on colonialism with France as the backdrop. In a way, THE SYMPATHIZER is like a 101 level university course, in that it lays down the foundational themes. In contrast, THE COMMITTED is an upper division course that digs deeper into the theory, while looking more closely at the nuances and contradictions.

If you loved THE SYMPATHIZER, THE COMMITTED is an excellent follow-up that is even more irreverent than the first.

Thank you to NetGalley and Grove Atlantic for providing me an advanced readers copy of this book! I can't wait to get my hands on my pre-order when it comes out (March 2, 2021)! Stay tuned for my full review (at which time this post will be edited).

cw: drug and alcohol use, gang violence/murder, prostitution, suicide