25 March 2024

A Man of Two Faces is a non-linear personal memoir filled with political commentary

Like Nguyen’s other books, this memoir is critical of the US military-industrial complex.

His oppositional stance informs his support of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, and since the outbreak of the Israel-Gaza war, he’s been a vocal advocate for a cease-fire.

Two dates on his tour had to be moved to different locations, partly because of his public position on the conflict.

The cancellations underlined what his writing has sought to uncover: As Americans, Nguyen says, we’re trained “to think of wars as episodic” rather than as a continuous production of the American war machine and its long history. He’s made it his life’s mission to trace these larger connections until they are impossible to ignore.

FEATURE / MARCH 25, 2024

The Many Faces of Viet Thanh Nguyen

The Vietnamese American writer’s leap to the mainstream comes at a moment that demands his anti-colonialist perspective.

MARI UYEHARA

The Many Faces of Viet Thanh Nguyen | The Nation

". . .These days, Nguyen, 53, jokingly refers to himself as “a professional Vietnamese American.” A famous novelist and a professor at the University of Southern California, Nguyen has spent his professional career exploring the afterlife of colonial conquest and war in the Vietnamese diaspora.
Last fall, he began a national book tour for his new memoir, A Man of Two Faces, which follows his family’s history from Vietnam to the United States in a nonsequential narrative filled with meditations on memory, racism, and pop-culture propaganda. The book’s unconventional form, Nguyen says, was intended as a “meta-narrative” that makes explicit that the American dream is “a euphemism for settler colonialism.”

__________________________________________________________________

Saigoneer

Viet Thanh Nguyen Memoir 'A Man of Two Faces' Releases Today - Saigoneer

Described by the Star Tribune as an "artfully intertwined medley of Nguyen's essays, lectures and interviews," the book has already been long-listed for the prestigious National Book Award for nonfiction.

Viet Thanh Nguyen achieved international fame via his 2017 novel The Sympathizer which won the Pulitzer Prize and is currently being developed by HBO and A24 into a television series to be released in 2024. Since then, the University of Southern California professor has published two collections of non-fiction essays, a collection of short stories and 2021's The Committed, the second in the three-part Sympathizer series.

A Man of Two Faces is a non-linear personal memoir filled with political commentary, according to Kirkus Reviews. In addition to detailing his family's departure from Vietnam in 1975 when he was four years old, his childhood in California and his experiences in academia it includes text arranged like poetry, photographs and a portion of a bad Amazon review.

Fans of Nguyen's work will recognize some common themes in his memoir including discussions of race, identity, assimilation and violence in America. His interest in Hollywood's depictions of Vietnamese and Vietnamese Americans loom with the publisher's description of the book noting: "As a teenager, the blood-stirring drama of the films of the Vietnam War such as Apocalypse Now throw Nguyen into an existential crisis: how can he be both American and Vietnamese, both the killer and the person being killed?"

Amongst the most acclaimed contemporary American writers, the book's release has enjoyed significant coverage including a recent article examining the design process behind the cover. Curious readers can check out an adapted section of the book recently published by The New Yorker or secure a digital edition from major online retailers.

This April, an adaptation of his Pulitzer Prize–winning debut novel, The Sympathizer, will air on HBO. “That’s a feat, as far as I’m concerned,” Nguyen says of making “a seven-part miniseries that is extremely explicit about white supremacy and decolonization.”