The Committed also reiterates the ideas first articulated in The Sympathizer. From a satirical James Bond-esque spy story in The Sympathizer, the author shifts to James Baldwin's intersectional politics in The Committed to address greed, prejudice, and violence. More intimate in setting than The Sympathizer's transcontinental scope, The Committed employs the motif of organized crime as linkage between the various demimondes populated by disaffected Algerian immigrants, maternal Cambodian prostitutes, and nostalgic Vietnamese thugs all living in France. That our hero arrives four days after Bastille Day is significant, for the ideals of liberté, egalité, and fraternité have proven elusive in France's former colonies, and it would take a visionary of Mandela's stature to give them new life. Having survived a communist reeducation camp, a perilous sea crossing, and a long sojourn in an Indonesian refugee center, he arrives in Paris on Jthe birthday of Nelson Mandela - to become, once again, a refugee. With smoke-and-mirrors panache, The Committed - Viet Thanh Nguyen's sequel to The Sympathizer - continues the travails of our Eurasian Ulysses, now relocated to France and self-identified as Vo Danh (which literally means "Nameless").
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