From one unreliable narrator come others
Author who fled Vietnam explores war, memory and identity
In one of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s earliest memories, he is on a boat leaving Saigon.
It was 1975, and he and his family had been turned away from the airport and the American Embassy but eventually got on a barge, then a ship. He can’t remember anything about the escape, other than soldiers on their ship firing at refugees who were approaching in a smaller boat.
It is Nguyen’s only childhood memory from Vietnam, and he isn’t sure if it really happened or if it came from something he read in a history book. To him, whether he personally witnessed the shooting doesn’t matter.
“I have a memory that I can’t rely on, but all the historical information points to the fact that all this stuff happened, if not to us, then to other people,” he said in a video interview this month.
Real or imagined, the image and feeling stayed with him and shaped his new novel, “The Committed,” a sequel to his Pulitzer Prize-winning debut, “The Sympathizer.”
Like “The Sympathizer,” “The Committed,” which Grove Press will publish Tuesday, hinges on questions about individual and collective identity and memory, how wars are memorialized, whose war stories get told and what happens when abstract political ideologies are clumsily deployed in the real world. It is packed with gunfights, kidnappings, sex and drugs but delivered in dense prose that refers to obscure scholarly texts and name-checks philosophers like Sartre, Voltaire, de Beauvoir, Fanon and Rousseau.
“The Committed” opens with a scene that feels Homeric, as a group of refugees make a treacherous journey in the belly of a fishing boat. As a refugee — and as someone who often points out that he is a refugee, not an immigrant — Nguyen wanted to use epic imagery to describe the voyage, to counter the stereotype of refugees as pitiful and weak.
“From the perspective of the West and people who are not refugees, boat people — people who flee by the sea — are pathetic. They’re desperate,