Viet Thanh Nguyen’s debut novel “The Sympathizer” introduced readers to its unnamed protagonist, a half-Vietnamese, half-French communist double agent navigating life, love, loyalty and espionage in Los Angeles after the fall of Saigon.
In Nguyen’s sequel, “The Committed,” his narrator is “still a man of two faces and two minds.” But now he is also “a revolutionary without a revolution,” a refugee in 1980s Paris who is grappling with politics, ideologies, and himself.
“I wasn’t done with his story,” says Nguyen, who joins the Los Angeles Times Book Club on March 10. “I’m very cognizant of the fact that people read “The Sympathizer” as a Vietnam War novel and me as a Vietnamese American writing about the Vietnam War.”