![]() ![]() Speaker 1: Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannan foundation. Listen to the interview at KCRW or read the transcript below. 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. The choice between being Vietnamese and being human turns out to be a false one after all.Michael Silverblatt speaks to Viet Thanh Nguyen about his new book The Committed and the literary inspirations behind it for Bookworm. These are novels about a specific people-the colonized, the war-scarred, the immigrant-that also transcend those 'petty circumstances' of identity. The Committed has some of a sequel’s inherent inelegance-the book’s repetitions and reminders of what’s come before will be useful to most readers. manic language and impossible story suit the strange truth of colonialism. The Sympathizer and The Committed are, to borrow James Wood’s phrase for such novels, perpetual-motion machines, their exuberance perhaps a suitable method given how vast a subject he aims to tackle. In a decade whose fiction is dominated by autofiction, there’s something démodé about Nguyen’s novels, which I think can fairly be considered a single artistic endeavor. The motif of sexual or bodily violation as the ultimate expression of the colonial project-the point of no return-is maybe repetitive, or perhaps that is Nguyen’s point. The plot whirrs and clicks like a Rube Goldberg contraption. The book is so intellectually rigorous I wanted a syllabus (in truth, as above, the author provides one). The Committed does not ask for our credulity, but our attention. But Nguyen seems more comfortable, now, with the artifice of his project. Yes, there’s the big boss, banally evil in his polo shirts, and the rival gangs from the former colonies at war in the seedier of Paris’s arrondissements. Its sequel is more ironic about the conventions of crime fiction. The Sympathizer could conceivably be enjoyed by an aficionado of the spy novel. ![]() May that voice keep running like a purifying venom through the mainstream of our self-regard-through the American dream of distancing ourselves from what we continue to show ourselves to be. It’s a voice that shakes the walls of the old literary comfort zone wherein the narratives of nonwhite 'immigrants' were tasked with proving their shared humanity to a white audience. That voice has made Nguyen a standard-bearer in what seems to be a transformational moment in the history of American literature, a perspectival shift. It has nothing to do with plot or theme or character. This mission drives the rhetorical intensity that makes his novels so electric. Nguyen is driven to raptures of expression by the obliviousness of the self-satisfied he relentlessly punctures the self-image of French and American colonizers, of white people generally, of true believers and fanatics of every stripe. The novel is a homecoming of a particularly volatile sort, a tale of chickens returning to roost, and of a narrator not yet done with the world. ![]()
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