Krishnadev Calamur reviews The Committed for NPR Books.
Although sequels to literary successes aren’t rare, few deliver on the promise of the initial work. But that’s not so with Viet Thanh Nguyen’s book The Committed. The formerly unnamed narrator of The Sympathizer trades the underbelly of Los Angeles and the squalid reeducation camps of Vietnam for Paris, where he sells hashish to intellectuals while undergoing a mental breakdown. On the face of it, the novel is a thriller, but dig deeper and it tells the story of not only what immigrants often must do to survive, but also the dehumanizing impact of colonialism on the colonized.
