K NGUYEN: A crime-romp through 80s Paris? And I thought that The Committed would be a continuation of that: an exercise in just memory. I thought that was beautiful – and profound. That requires of us that we remember our own inhumanity, ‘the unspeakable things from which we have profited’. And he writes there – I underlined this passage so many times that the pen started to wear through the paper – he writes: ‘The basic dialectic of memory and amnesia is…more fundamentally about remembering our humanity and forgetting our inhumanity, while conversely remembering the inhumanity of others and forgetting their humanity.’ The whole point of the book is an attempt to move beyond that dialectic, to what he calls ‘just memory’ and an ‘ethics of recognition’. And then he put out Nothing Ever Dies, a non-fiction book about Vietnam and war, and how every war is fought twice, on the battlefield, and then in memory. I guess I expected something a little different.
And I know what you mean about the writing. KEN NGUYEN: I got mine off my Congressman – ever since he tweeted about anti-Asian racism, he’s been getting new books in the post. Anyway, that’s why the publisher sent me an advance copy. The Committed got 2 stars – the characters left me cold, I mean, why are these Vietnamese refugees running around Paris quoting Julia Kristeva and Jean-Paul Sartre? And they’re always exclaiming! And of course, Viet Thanh Nguyen isn’t clear enough in his denunciation of the Communists. I’ve got a SubStack, ‘The Vietnamese Patriot’. Actually, I’ve read every book published in English by a Viet diaspora writer since 1975. This will come as a great shock to you but I’ve read all of his books. You think you’re the only ones who read books. K NGUYEN: Considering it’s not even out yet – K NGUYEN: (Laughing) I can’t believe you two, of all people, have read The Committed. KEN NGUYEN: (Grabbing the book out of Kenneth’s hand) Mine. KENNETH NGUYEN (Reaching for the book): I think this is – They each have their phones out, cameras facing each other. Three young men stand around a book on the floor. Beside it is the flag of the Republic of Vietnam, three horizontal red stripes on a yellow field. A Confederate flag is planted in a bin in the corner. A nondescript room in the US Capitol Building. All rights reserved.KENNETH NGUYEN, a Vietnamese-American patriotĦ JANUARY 2021. Reprinted with permission of the publisher, Grove Press, an imprint of Grove Atlantic, Inc. Let's just hope France is better than America.Įxcerpted from "The Committed" © 2021 Viet Thanh Nguyen. Was the third time the charm, as the Americans liked to say? Bon sighed before he pulled his airline-provided sleeping mask over his eyes. Stepping out of the airplane, we were gripped by a sense of relief, for we had reached asylum, the fever dream of all refugees, especially those rendered refugees not just once or twice but three times: 1954, nine years after I was born 1975, when I was young and reasonably handsome and 1979, just two years ago. We, Bon and I, arrived in the airport at night on a flight from Jakarta. I assumed this name in anticipation of coming here to Paris, or, as our French masters taught us to call it, the City of Light.
I could tell you the name I have in my passport, VO DANH.
Yes, I admit it! I am not just one but two. What was a man with two minds except a mutant? Perhaps even a monster. With two minds, I am able to see any issue from both sides, and while I once flattered myself that this was a talent, now I understand it to be a curse. I am also still a man of two faces and two minds, one of which might perhaps yet still be intact. This must make me a ghostwriter, and as such, it is a simple, if spooky, matter to dip my pen into the ink flowing from my twin holes, one drilled by myself, the other by Bon, my best friend and blood brother. What a peculiar condition, being dead yet penning these lines in my little room in Paradise. How can I not be, with two holes in my head from which leaks the black ink in which I am writing these words. I may no longer be a spy or a sleeper, but I am most definitely a spook. In "The Committed" (Grove Press), a sequel to the author's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel "The Sympathizer," author Viet Thanh Nguyen follows his communist spy protagonist as he arrives in 1980s Paris to take up a new persona: drug dealer.
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