Viet Thanh Nguyen - O Comprometido

“There I was, a two-faced man. Which face was I showing myself and them at that moment? What was I, a revolutionary or a reactionary? And, being a revolutionary, what was my struggle? To what creed was I committed?”

Vo Danh, or Anonymous, a former spy turned refugee, a communist sympathizer who survived a re-education camp, the son of a poor Vietnamese mother and an absent French father, arrives in Paris in the early 1980s to begin yet another new life. In the City of Lights, he is awaited by the Boss, for whom he will work as a drug courier, and an “aunt” who is an editor and will give him shelter, intellectual stimulation, and encouragement to write. Carrying with him the ghosts of war and its crimes, and his Euro-Asian heritage, the hundreds of pages of his confession seek to answer the most important question of the 20th century: “What to do?” In his final descent into Hell, Vo Danh embarks on a turbulent search for his identity, while forcibly trying to integrate into a dominant Western culture that both disturbs and seduces him.

The Committed is a brilliant and existentialist literary thriller that virulently portrays oppression and otherness, commitment and betrayal, against the backdrop of the Vietnam War and the damaging consequences of ideologies.