His tragicomic narrator dazzled the literary scene in his debut novel "The Sympathizer", winning Viet Thanh Nguyen the Pulitzer Prize in 2016. The author's nameless Franco-Vietnamese protagonist returns for a sequel entitled "The Committed". Viet joins us in the studio to talk about the complex political and personal forces that shaped his fictional creation.
As his book revisits the Paris of the 1980s, we discuss the experience of Vietnamese exiles in France and the US, French cultural eccentricities and the parallels between the fall of Saigon in 1975 and the recent chaos in Kabul as the Taliban took over in Afghanistan.
