Viet Thanh Nguyen: “The Committed”

Bookworm

KCRW

Arts

4.5 • 606 Ratings

🗓️ 4 March 2021

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

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. 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. This is duality enacted as a writing method; this is a union between theory and fiction. A novel of ideas and politics and history and theory, but also a crime novel. A novel you’re not born knowing how to read, and you might have to reread it, this is exciting contemporary literature.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.
0:03.7	Boots!
0:08.8	Where would we be without books?
0:12.6	Where would we be without good?
0:14.8	No, Zintuberg.
0:16.4	It's a rhetorical question, sir.
0:19.7	But where would we need without books?
0:25.1	From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm, and today I have
0:32.8	the honor and pleasure to be talking to Vietan Wynne.
0:42.5	He is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer.
0:49.5	A second volume in that series has just been published called The Committed. Both books were published by Grove Press.
0:53.5	He has also written many essays, critical works, anthologies.
0:58.8	He has a collection of short stories as well called The Refugees.
1:03.8	I'm a fan with pleasurable difficulties with his work.
1:09.9	Welcome, Viet Tanwin. Hi, Michael. Such a pleasure to be here.
1:14.9	I want to take a different approach to the committed, your new book, because I see people avoiding the subject.
1:30.3	And for me, this is one of the thrilling meeting places,
1:37.3	one of the very few meeting places in American fiction,
1:43.3	where theory meets the novel.
1:47.7	And so as you're reading The Committed, the hero of the sympathizer is now in France.
1:56.4	It's quite natural that he meets people who speak to him in the terms that we now use to
2:05.2	in America that come from French critical theory, political theory, and philosophy.
	...

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