![]() ![]() The Sympathizer’s dynamic mélange of satire, pastiche, historical drama, suspense, and violence has received voluminous critical attention, with many readers remarking especially on Nguyen’s knowing references to and reworkings of passages from canonical works such as Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. That novel transformed Nguyen from a successful academic into a literary celebrity and brought him numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize. ![]() Nguyen, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and MacArthur “genius grant” awardee, has built a body of sophisticated, learned, and wickedly ironic work, including his monograph on Asian American literature, Race and Resistance his study of the cultural memory of what Vietnamese call the American War, Nothing Ever Dies his short story collection, The Refugees and his expansive and satirical war novel, The Sympathizer. In his new novel The Committed, the Vietnamese American novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen dramatizes Adorno’s thesis, offering readers a work of postcolonial theory in the guise of a crime novel, a book that resists the annihilating violence of our world with the power of what we might call its nihilist form. In the essay “ commitment,” first published in 1962, Theodor Adorno asserts, “It is not the office of art to spotlight alternatives, but to resist by its form alone the course of the world, which permanently puts a pistol to men’s heads.” Adorno is making the point here, somewhat dramatically-though not, in light of the Holocaust informing it, hyperbolically-that the true measure of any work’s resistance to the everyday brutality of politics lies not in its content but rather in its form, since it is only through form that art can genuinely express human freedom. ![]()
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