The Committed

By Viet Thanh Nguyen (Nguyễn Thanh Việt)

Viet Thanh Nguyen's 2021 novel is the sequel to The Sympathizer. The unnamed narrator, a communist spy and a man of two minds, arrives in Paris in 1981 as a refugee with his blood brother Bon. Short of money, the two fall into dealing drugs for a local crime boss. Moving between that criminal underworld and the leftist intellectuals of his aunt's salon, the narrator wrestles with colonialism, revolution and his own divided loyalties, French and Vietnamese, in a darkly comic voice.

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Ryan Holiday: “I love a good novel in the second person and while this is not technically that, it bends and breaks so many conventions that you really have to pay close attention.”