阮清越新作： The Committed
Viet Thanh Nguyen 阮清越
By Michael Upchurch 西雅图时报
By Junot Díaz 纽约时报
编译+摘录：译生菌
2015年，阮清越凭借处女作《同情者》获得普利策奖。暌违6年，其新作THE COMMITTED（或译信仰者）面世。
移民、鬼魂、间谍和战争，四者的共同之处在于：它们都恐怖神秘，捉摸不定又挥之不去，纠缠不清。一旦你进入其中，便难以脱身。故事的讲述者，作为移民逃到法国，他曾当过间谍，经历残酷的战争，身负血债而被鬼魂纠缠，如何在一个已经破碎的世界生存，如何定位自己的身份？
书名The Committed 是个双关语，既指效忠于信仰，又指精神病收容所里的制度化{？ institutionalization in a psychiatric asylum ）。与《同情者》相比，《忠诚者》中故事讲述人的设定更正常理智，作者可以在书中使用一些知识概念。
故事一开篇，故事的讲述者就已经“死”了。“在我的头上有两个洞，墨水从洞里流出。我正在用这些墨水写下文字”。他曾在越共改造营中饱受折磨，还在印度尼西亚的难民营待了两年。之后，设法和好友Bon一起逃到巴黎，进入了当地的越南侨民圈子。那是个政治大杂烩的圈子，亲法派、共产主义者和反越共的人都混在一起。回看越南国内的战争冲突，真是讽刺。
他的护照名叫Vo Danh，本质上也是个无名之人。Vo Danh到法国后，对自己的信仰和身份开始动摇。他会“突如其来地痛苦”,被他手上的血债鬼魂纠缠。显然，他正在分裂。
他的解决办法是，从“职业间谍”变成了“黑帮小弟”。他在染上毒瘾后不久，就跟Bon成了毒贩。在脑子十分混乱的情况下，他还是会不停质问自己关于存在的问题。
他感觉拥抱了“虚无”就拥有了力量，对世界极度悲观，尤其否认人与人之间的连接。他挖苦道，“婚戒，是世界上最没意义的象征物。”他还说，“拥抱，是最反人性和最恶心的两性行为”。文中不发此类尖酸讽刺的言论。
By the end of “The Committed,” its cover as a spy novel is blown and its true genre is revealed: It’s a ghost story, if it’s any kind at all. The novel’s tension derives not from whether Vo Danh will survive the drug war or his past offenses, but whether this spectral man will, in the fullest meaning of the word, live.
Vo Danh might long for an end to his wars, but he can’t stop prosecuting his ghost battles, in the past or the present, can’t see the world through any other lens. A condom recalls Vietnam’s colonial rubber plantations. A disrobed prostitute evokes the face of the Communist agent he helped destroy. His dead mother finds him no matter where he is or what he’s thinking. He is that ghost who clings to his hauntedness as you or I might cling to life. His allegiance to his spectrality is perhaps his truest commitment. Even his false name — Vo Danh, literally No Name — is what’s carved on the headstones for unidentified bodies. He embodies the maxim that while colonialism’s atrocities are never past, its victims are never present either. Vo Danh isn’t alone in his plight: Everywhere he looks in France he encounters others like him, whom coloniality has both ghosted and made ghosts of. The condition of the native may be a nervous condition, as Fanon observed, but it is also a collective one.
“If you don’t talk, you’d die.” Bon got it half-right. If Vo Danh didn’t talk so much, I suspect he would have to find a way to declare a truce with himself, and who knows where that might lead? To feeling, to mourning, perhaps even, dare I say it, to life?
Two related questions that echo through our narrative and our narrator:
“Could a dead man commit suicide?”
“How do you forgive the unforgivable?”
The first is easy: Of course a dead man can commit suicide; he only has to choose life. At the end of the novel, the ghost who is given pride of place in the narrator’s heart, his mother, is reborn, slightly, beautifully. A premonition that even someone as spectral as the narrator might have a chance at resurrection too.
The second question is trickier and each of us must decide, in a culture like ours where forgiveness is nowhere to be seen, if that’s even something we believe in anymore. Nguyen does not answer this all-important question for us — he’s too smart a writer to truck in platitudes — but if this incandescent novel teaches us anything, it is that forgiveness is a joy of the living, not the burden of the dead.
In my enthusiasm, I’ve forgotten my critic’s duty to point out deficiencies. There are some. The jokes can sometimes overstay their welcome. The narrator, acutely sensitive to racial discourses of every kind, uses the word “spook” without reflecting on its racist resonances, a missed opportunity.
Any other shortcomings?
Yes, a very big one:
The novel ends.
