The Committed (The Sympathizer, 2)

Amazon.com Review\nAn Amazon Best Book of March 2021: In The Committed, we follow the same nameless narrator to Paris where he is “no longer a spy or a sleeper”—as he was in the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Sympathizer—but “most definitely a spook.” Still a refugee, our fearless narrator now must survive the dark and deadly world of drug dealing, which he approaches with entertaining bravado and foolishness. Readers new to the series, and those returning, will marvel at Nguyen’s dexterity at conveying a man of two minds and the rhythmic beat of this wry, intense, and comedic novel. —Al Woodworth, Amazon Book Review\nThe sequel to The Sympathizer, which won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction and went on to sell over a million copies worldwide, The Committed tells the story of “the man of two minds” as he comes as a refugee to France and turns his hand to capitalism
The long-awaited follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Sympathizer, which has sold more than one million copies worldwide, The Committed follows the man of two minds as he arrives in Paris in the early 1980s with his blood brother Bon. The pair try to overcome their pasts and ensure their futures by engaging in capitalism in one of its purest forms: drug dealing.
Traumatized by his reeducation at the hands of his former best friend, Man, and struggling to assimilate into French culture, the Sympathizer finds Paris both seductive and disturbing. As he falls in with a group of left-wing intellectuals whom he meets at dinner parties given by his French Vietnamese “aunt,” he finds stimulation for his mind but also customers for his narcotic merchandise. But the new life he is making has perils he has not foreseen, whether the self-torture of addiction, the authoritarianism of a state locked in a colonial mindset, or the seeming paradox of how to reunite his two closest friends whose worldviews put them in absolute opposition. The Sympathizer will need all his wits, resourcefulness, and moral flexibility if he is to prevail.
Both highly suspenseful and existential, The Committed is a blistering portrayal of commitment and betrayal that will cement Viet Thanh Nguyen’s position in the firmament of American letters.