In The Wretched of the Earth, published in French in 1961, Fanon writes that “violence detoxifies frees the colonized from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction.” In the novel, this is quoted by a thug who regularly beats people up over drug money, as well as by the sympathizer, who also keeps harming people for increasingly dubious reasons. Whereas the real criminal is the capitalist who disavows his own crime.”Īt the center of the novel’s struggle with violence is an argument with the Marxist philosopher Frantz Fanon. “As the sympathizer says,” Nguyen told me, “a drug dealer may be bad, but at least you’re honest about being a crook. The drug violence of Algerian and Vietnamese gangs is only a shadow of the violence directed at Vietnamese and Algerian people by the French government. “When it comes to crime stories, I think any crime writer who’s any good understands that the individual crimes are nowhere near as serious as the crimes of the state and crimes of corporations and crimes of the powerful,” Nguyen said. He made the book a crime novel because crime is a good metaphor for the violence and injustice of colonialism. Nguyen says he chose the French setting because he wanted to explore that country’s relationship to racism and violence as well. His second book takes place in France-Vietnam’s first European colonizer, which brutally repressed numerous rebellions against foreign rule before losing the final struggle to keep the country in its grip. Nguyen’s first book examined America’s relationship to Vietnam’s imperial history.

Then he moves to more dangerous clients and more dangerous drugs, sliding down a slippery slope of bad luck, indifference, and casual avarice. The sympathizer becomes a drug dealer in the Paris underworld, supplying Marxist academics with cannabis at first. The answer, as it turns out, is that he’d pursue a career of crime. I wanted to pursue that question of what a revolutionary without a revolution would do next.” In the novel’s last pages, they are released and set off in a refugee boat, sailing to France and Nguyen’s second novel.Īt the beginning of The Committed, Nguyen told me, his narrator is a “revolutionary who has become disillusioned with communism but hadn’t given up on the idea of the necessity of revolution itself. He and Bon are tortured in a communist Vietnamese prison camp. By the end of that book, he has perpetrated enough atrocities that euphemisms no longer serve, especially since atrocities have also been committed against him. “Even as a secret policeman, however, I never used violence insomuch as I allowed others to use it in front of me,” the narrator rationalizes with urbane equivocation. The sympathizer follows the general from Vietnam to the United States when the war is lost and then returns back to Vietnam, committing along the way various horrific acts for causes he believes are noble-until he starts to wonder if they aren’t. The other, Bon, is a rabid anti-communist in the South Vietnamese general’s service, blithely unaware that the narrator is a spy. He is caught between his two blood brothers.

The first book is told by an unnamed narrator, the sympathizer in the title, who serves as a North Vietnamese spy to a South Vietnamese general.

His new book, The Committed, is a sequel to his first Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Sympathizer, a metaphysical spy novel about colonialism and revolution. He emigrated from Vietnam as a child with his parents in 1975, and he has become one of America’s sharpest analysts of imperialism in general and of the country’s relationship with Vietnam in particular. Nguyen, a professor of English, American studies, and ethnicity at the University of Southern California Dornsife, has been examining questions about violence and revolution from multiple and divided perspectives in both his academic work and his fiction for years. “And then the question is, what happens in terms of violence: both the violence of the state and the violence of the revolutionary?” “I am someone who believes that you do need revolutions when there’s injustice,” Viet Thanh Nguyen told me by phone. Noah Berlatsky reviews The Committed for Foreign Policy.

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