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And myself as a refugee and as an Asian American felt that I was always living a life of duality. Du Bois was grappling with duality in his theory of double consciousness. So there’s a dual strand of thinking there from Dostoevsky to black plot. And Dostoevsky influenced Ralph Ellison in the writing of Invisible Man. Viet Thanh Nguyen : Well, you mentioned Dostoevsky, and certainly reading Dostoevsky was a big influence. Now, how did you invent a prose style that allowed you to do that, to express opposites at the same time?

And this is a character who is double-minded, which means he practices telling us that he sees both sides of an issue, often opposing sides. Now, once upon a time the theory of the double in literature was everything we’d hear about Dostoevsky. Michael Silverblatt: Our sympathizer, now the committed has to ask questions like what being committed means? To a politics, to a country, to an insane asylum? All things remain possibilities in the book and he’s double-minded. But working through them, that act of thinking through what they were proposing and the ideas that they had absolutely changed me. To read Derrida when I was like 20, for example, or Foucault when I was 20, or feminist philosophers like Cixous and Julia Kristeva really challenged me. And theory in particular, what we’re talking about here was very difficult. And I think for me, it’s an exciting place because I remember my immersion in both theory and literature to be tremendously exciting and passionate, it opened my mind, it transformed my life. And it’s taken a lifetime of practice writing again and again, to try to get to this place.

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And my challenge as a writer back then was to try to figure out how to talk about them all at the same time. So all of these ideas were merging for me.

And I was also trying to be a political activist. And then also of course I was trying be a writer at that time. I’m someone who was trained at UC Berkeley as an undergraduate and graduate student in both literary criticism and in literary theory. Were you writing this aware of this as a demanding union between theory and fiction?

People like Adorno, and Althusser, and Kristeva, and the magnificent Césaire, the discourse on colonialism, and Hélène Cixous, Jacques Derrida, Frantz Fanon, all the people I think that students learn in college. And so as you’re reading The Committed, the hero of The Sympathizer is now in France, it’s quite natural that he meets people who speak to him in the terms that we now use too in America that come from French critical theory, political theory, and philosophy. One of the very few meeting places in American fiction where theory meets the novel. And for me, this is one of the thrilling meeting places. Michael Silverblatt: I want to take a different approach to The Committed your new book, because I see people avoiding the subject. I’m a fan with pleasurable difficulties with his work. He has a collection of short stories as well called The Refugees. He has also written many essays, critical works anthologies. Both books were published by Grove Press.

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A second volume in that series has just been published called The Committed. He is the Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Sympathizer. And today I have the honor and pleasure to be talking to Viet Thanh Nguyen. Michael Silverblatt: From KCRW and, I’m Michael Silverblatt and this is Bookworm. Speaker 1: Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannan foundation. Listen to the interview at KCRW or read the transcript below. A novel you’re not born knowing how to read, and you might have to reread it, this is exciting contemporary literature. A novel of ideas and politics and history and theory, but also a crime novel. This is duality enacted as a writing method this is a union between theory and fiction. It brings Nguyen’s storytelling further into the philosophy of refugees, feminism, communism, anti-communism and more-the terror of both the American war in Vietnam and the French presence in Vietnam, along with the Vietnamese presence in America andFrance. Viet Thanh Nguyen discusses his new novel, “The Committed,” the follow-up to his Pulitzer-winning “The Sympathizer,” and the second entry in a planned trilogy.

Michael Silverblatt speaks to Viet Thanh Nguyen about his new book The Committed and the literary inspirations behind it for Bookworm.