“The Committed,” by Viet Thanh Nguyen, 2021
This is the sequel to “The Sympathizer.” It follows Vo Danh, its nameless hero to Paris,
where he chooses to go after spending time in a Vietnamese refugee camp. He is haunted by two murders he was forced to
commit for Vietnamese rightists in California and the rape and torture of a
Viet Cong woman in Saigon he couldn’t stop.
Half French, half Vietnamese, this ‘crazy bastard’ ping pongs between
his two ethnic identities; his past Communist sympathies and his post-Communist
reality; his anti-Communist blood-brother Bon and his masked Communist
blood-brother Man; French colonialism and culture and Vietnamese oppression and
culture; even the echo of facile Americanisms.
The screw holding the two sides of his head together – me and mine - sometimes
shakes loose and falls out, then mysteriously screws back in. He fits everywhere and nowhere – the
universal half-man who sees all sides of everything. The poor bastard.
Instead of being a Communist under-cover agent who is
eventually tortured by his own side, in Paris he falls into a secretive
Vietnamese gang running dope, whores, protection and loans. He is now a ‘gangster’ selling hashish to silly
leftist intellectuals and poofy French Vietnamese. He survives this miasma with cognac, hash and
cocaine cures, while at the same time in a bloody struggle with another gang of shabby
French colonial victims – the Algerians.
The times are in the late 1970s in Paris and the Soviets
have just intervened in Afghanistan (1979) to support a modernizing Afghan government.
The book, being set in France, name-drops philosophers and left philosophy
– Althusser, Sartre, Kristeva, de Beauvoir, Fanon, Césaire, Gramsci. Even the nameless one’s nickname is Camus,
though he’s a stranger to L’Etranger.
The Senegalese bouncer at the Heaven whorehouse reads Fanon, Gramsci and
Voltaire while watching the Johns. Strict anarchists, hip Communists, pompous Socialists and talky
Maoist PHDs discuss colonialism, racism, capitalism and France. The nameless one does his best to keep up.
The book is a comedic, political and psychological tour-de-force, but it suffers a bit from the familiarity of its predecessor (The Sympathizer is reviewed below). The ying-yang man’s constant internal vacillations between ostensible and simple dyads makes you want to shake him and say, “Make up your fucking mind! Dialectics!” He does hint at an improved ‘third position’ but that never appears as a settled force until perhaps the last minute. In practice he seems to be mostly a killer for the Vietnamese right, their accomplice and interrogator, then a drug dealer and gang member … no matter what is going on in his head or his prior role as a Communist informer.
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| Paris by Night - Vietnamese Version |
Nguyen makes delicious fun of everyone, including our
anti-heroic hero, set in the beauties and warehouse banlieues of the “City of
Light.” More dyads: French sophistication and hypocrisy;
American simpletons and air conditioning; Vietnamese gambling and his mother,
his mama-san, his mére, his mẹ. This is
the book’s juice. The whole planet is full of sad fools evidently, all wearing masks. Which undermines
its political impact, an intention no doubt intentional.
The book ends like a glitzy thug-life melodrama out of Netflix– our stylish but beaten-down ying-yang
man driving a large BMW, lots of money stashed under his bed, free champagne
and the sexy woman of his dreams returned, all at a campy stage show called 'Fantasia.' This at the same time as he tries to keep Bon from
killing Man, as they are 'da' 3 blood-brothers. Ultimately Paris and philosophy come together. We find out what ‘commitment’ really
means and ‘which’ commitment is meant.
Prior reviews on this topic, use blog search box, upper
left: “The Sympathizer,” “Tree of
Smoke,” “Da 5 Bloods,” “Matterhorn,” “Artists Respond: American Art and the
Vietnam War,” “The Post,” or the word
“Vietnam” for non-fiction books on Vietnam or "Paris" for books about France.
And I bought it at May Day Books!
Red Frog
April 22, 2021
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