A New York Times Best Seller
The long-awaited
follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize-winning The
Sympathizer, which has sold more than one million copies
worldwide, The Committed follows the man of two minds as he
arrives in Paris in the early 1980s with his blood brother Bon. The
pair try to overcome their pasts and ensure their futures by engaging
in capitalism in one of its purest forms: drug dealing.
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. 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. 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. The
Sympathizer will need all his wits, resourcefulness,
and moral flexibility if he is to prevail.
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.