If you missed it let me refresh your memory. Viet Thanh Nguyen, the author, releases “The Devout”, a novel which reconnects with the character of his last novel which was entitled “The Sympathizer” and which won the Pulitzer Prize and the prize for the best foreign book excuse the little.
He told the confessions of a double agent in the service of the communists who fled Saigon in 1975 and settled in Los Angeles. He reported from the United States on the lives of exiles there. And inevitably he was very afraid of betraying himself. His character was very ambiguous and necessarily ambivalent. It was a powerful book, both funny and tragic which counted us this whole piece of history which we do not know well, the war of Vietnam and its consequences.
And for the rest, our famous sympathizer is in Paris. He has just escaped from a communist re-education camp and arrived in the French capital in 1981. He has decided to let go of his past, but the city is not kind to him. He sympathizes, it is the case to say it, with leftist intellectuals thanks to whom he sets up a traffic of cannabis but very quickly one returns to him a very negative image of his identity, both French and Vietnamese. He will therefore feel his anger resurface. In addition, the torturer with whom he had to deal at the camp would also be in Paris and would work at the Vietnamese embassy. The sequel, I can tell you, was eagerly awaited by many readers around the world. And she looks as good as the first one.
Fans were able to meet him last week in Paris and last weekend at the Brive Book Fair. He wanted to be present for the French release of the book.
Also note that “The Sympathizer” has been adapted serially with Robert Downey Junior for HBO. But as I would always prefer books to screens, I therefore recommend that you get “Le Devoué”, the follow-up to Viet Thanh Nguyen’s sympathizer, from Belfond editions. Good reading.