One of the very few meeting places in American fiction where theory meets the novel. And for me, this is one of the thrilling meeting places.
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Michael Silverblatt: I want to take a different approach to The Committed your new book, because I see people avoiding the subject. I’m a fan with pleasurable difficulties with his work. He has a collection of short stories as well called The Refugees. He has also written many essays, critical works anthologies. Both books were published by Grove Press.
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A second volume in that series has just been published called The Committed. He is the Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Sympathizer. And today I have the honor and pleasure to be talking to Viet Thanh Nguyen. Michael Silverblatt: From KCRW and, I’m Michael Silverblatt and this is Bookworm. Speaker 1: Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannan foundation. Listen to the interview at KCRW or read the transcript below.
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A novel you’re not born knowing how to read, and you might have to reread it, this is exciting contemporary literature. A novel of ideas and politics and history and theory, but also a crime novel. This is duality enacted as a writing method this is a union between theory and fiction. It brings Nguyen’s storytelling further into the philosophy of refugees, feminism, communism, anti-communism and more-the terror of both the American war in Vietnam and the French presence in Vietnam, along with the Vietnamese presence in America andFrance. Viet Thanh Nguyen discusses his new novel, “The Committed,” the follow-up to his Pulitzer-winning “The Sympathizer,” and the second entry in a planned trilogy. She teaches in the Mile High MFA program at Regis University in Denver.Michael Silverblatt speaks to Viet Thanh Nguyen about his new book The Committed and the literary inspirations behind it for Bookworm. Jenny Shank's novel "The Ringer" won the High Plains Book Award. With "The Committed," Nguyen has once again animated the complexity of a refugee's situation and plunged into a thicket of thorny matters of politics, nationality, race and identity, but has done so with characteristic heart, style and good humor that will leave readers both schooled and entertained. It's the kind of run-on sentence that writing teachers might warn their students against attempting - but Nguyen finesses it with the grace and flair of a parkour athlete flipping his body over the obstacles presented by a Paris street. One sentence weaves the narrator's mental acrobatics with a description of a life-or-death street fight, carries on for six pages and retains absolute clarity and propulsion. It's heady stuff, but it retains reader appeal through Nguyen's literary virtuosity. As "The Committed" unfolds, and the narrator becomes ever more mentally disintegrated, he personifies the contradictions and quicksilver identity shifts of a person raised in a colonized country who becomes a multilingual refugee twice over. Nguyen fills "The Committed" with playful literary allusions and delves into critical colonization theory, especially the work of Frantz Fanon.
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After the torture he underwent in "The Sympathizer," his head rings with a chorus of voices, and he frequently dialogues with various fragments of his consciousness. The strength of this novel is the same as that of its predecessor - the probing, sensitive, educated and droll mind of its narrator, who perceives power dynamics that few examine. The plot of "The Committed" is action-packed with sex, drugs and violence, but those events don't characterize the essence of the book. As he explores Paris, his insignificance to those he's observing allows him to draw keen conclusions, such as why the French so love American jazz: "partially because every sweet note reminded them of American racism, which conveniently let them forget their own racism." The narrator realizes his best prospect for employment is selling hashish.
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This potent friendship triangle drives the plot.Īlthough Nguyen foreshadows the showdown between the three "blood brothers" from the first page, he doesn't rush it, first plunging his characters into the Parisian gangster demimonde. Bon aims to kill Man, whose napalm-melted face conceals his true identity.
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In "The Committed," the narrator is no longer a spy, but remains relentlessly loyal to Bon, who resettles from a refugee camp with him to Paris, still knowing few of his secrets.