![]() The narrator’s personality, especially his penchant for philosophical rumination, seems to be much closer to a college professor’s (which Nguyen is) than to a war survivor’s. In an interview, the author says that the narrator is in many ways an alter ego. “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?”Īnd it requires some suspension of disbelief to accept that a war survivor who has worked as a spy and been horrendously tortured is so immersed in literary theory and philosophy, even as he goes about dealing drugs or visiting brothels. The book doesn’t answer questions about who he truly is, notwithstanding explanations like this: He wakes up with the “meaty taste of an existential crisis” in his mouth and brews coffee “that’s as black as the emptiness” within him, but his very intellectualism is a brick wall around his soul. One of the reasons I had trouble getting drawn into the story is that the narrator is largely unknowable. While the narrator may have left war and torture behind, unthinkable trauma follows him to the non-charming neighborhoods of Paris. But he quickly becomes involved in drug dealing, and the narrative hurtles from one wretched event to another.įrom portraying the cleaning of disgustingly clogged toilets to the witnessing of killings and the watching of strange orgies, the novel is unrelenting in its pursuit of the extreme and the loathsome. This period in his life turns out to be a short and pleasant interlude. The narrator - sometimes referred to as Crazy Bastard - who has escaped from a reeducation camp in Vietnam, initially stays with his aunt, who’s surrounded by intellectual friends. Here’s another example: the American capitalist eats “gigantic slabs of still-bleeding red meat,” while the Frenchman “preferred the refined cruelty of foie gras.” These analyses are often both astute and entertaining, if at times simplistic. He likens American capitalism to Coca-Cola, which wasn’t good for you, “no matter how it fizzled on the tongue.” But everything about Paris was charming: the shape of the baguettes, the coffee served in tiny cups, the paint peeling on doors.Ĭommentary about capitalism, colonialism, and culture crowd the novel. ![]() ![]() The Vietnamese “repulsed or seduced, but we never charmed.”Īnd America is certainly not charming, either. However, that same word “was too moderate of an adjective for a country and a people as hot and hot-blooded as mine,” he observes. ![]() Shortly after arriving in Paris, the unnamed narrator of both novels observes how charming Paris is. One of the most interesting aspects of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Committed, sequel to the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Sympathizer, is how much of a critique it is of three cultures: Vietnamese, American, and French. ![]()
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