It is, in short, an unashamedly political novel of the kind that has been out of fashion for several decades. There are references to texts by Marx, Sartre, De Beauvoir, Césaire, Fanon and others, as well as narrative threads that carry us through the major political, economic and societal aftershocks of late 19th-century colonial expansion: capitalism, the rise of communism, immigration, assimilation, hypercapitalism, religious extremism. The Committed is a dense book, full of lengthy debates between the characters, who have names such as “the Maoist PhD” and “the eschatological muscle”. Nguyen doesn’t stop until he has cut the whole of European empire down to the bone to expose the self-deceiving lie that, in some quarters, holds still – that of empire as a mostly benign “civilising mission”. In a story populated with characters from Vietnam, Algeria and French West Africa, the entire French colonial legacy comes under scrutiny. Where The Sympathizer challenged the popular narrative of the Vietnam war, the narrative being challenged here is that of empire, starting with the French occupation of what was then Indochina in the late 1800s and ending with the decisive defeat of the French by the Viet Minh at the battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954. He is very much a man to whom things happen, whose own agency is almost always a reaction to his circumstances, who is just trying to stay alive. Our unnamed hero soon becomes accidentally sucked into a Vietnamese criminal consortium and enters the Parisian underworld. In The Committed, the action shifts from the US to France, where the man of two faces has gone to live following his apparently successful re-education. In doing so he masterfully reversed the gaze to show America through the eyes of a Vietnamese refugee: communist, double agent, man of two faces. In The Sympathizer Nguyen seized the narrative of the war in Vietnam from American hands, reminding the world of the millions of Vietnamese who lost their lives, livelihoods, country and futures as a result. He has talked often about the indelible early experience of being a refugee. On arrival he lived away from them for a period, with a white sponsor family. In 1975, aged four, Nguyen left Vietnam with his parents, bound ultimately for the United States. It is, as Nguyen himself has observed in the past, the first time history has ever been written by the loser. It is the story of the impact that fighting the war had on the bodies, minds and hearts of mainly white American males. There he is held in a re-education camp where he is interrogated and tortured by “the faceless man”, forced to write and rewrite his “confession” in an attempt to correct his ideological position: the result is the book itself.įor decades the master narrative of the Vietnam war has been created by American books and movies. His journey led him from a shack in Saigon to life among wealthy Vietnamese exiles in Los Angeles, finally to confront his own past years later back in Vietnam. In a distinctive voice, one that mixed erudition with the vernacular, quiet reflection with emotional outburst and came threaded with a biting wit, he recounted his life as a Viet Cong spy. In 2016 the unnamed protagonist of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s first novel The Sympathizerwon his creator a Pulitzer prize for fiction. “W e were the unwanted, the unneeded and the unseen, invisible to all but ourselves.” And with those words he is back, the “man of two faces and two minds” as well as many guises: Vietnamese, French, American, soldier, academic, Japanese tourist, waiter, hoodlum, killer, communist, capitalist, spy.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |