We’re thrilled to announce that two esteemed special guests will join author Viet Thanh Nguyen and host John Freeman to discuss The Sympathizer, the California Book Club’s January selection, on Tuesday, January 28: Don McKellar and Rumaan Alam.
McKellar is the talented co-showrunner and executive producer of the HBO adaptation of The Sympathizer, a seven-part limited series. He is also an actor, a writer, a playwright, and a filmmaker known for films such as Last Night, Blindness, and eXistenZ.
His dark, stunning body of work is preoccupied with larger philosophical questions. McKellar acted in eXistenZ (1999), David Cronenberg’s dark film about a virtual reality game. He directed Last Night, an eerie apocalyptic film in which he also acted, alongside Sandra Oh, who would later play an important character in the HBO The Sympathizer: a Japanese American secretary in a Los Angeles university’s “Oriental studies” department, with whom the protagonist has a romance and who assimilates to avoid the experience of being othered in American society. Last Night concerns an unnamed calamity that has struck the world and explores how ordinary people in Toronto react to it. McKellar and Oh share a powerful and strangely moving sequence at the end of the film while the song “Guantanamera” plays hauntingly in the background. Blindness (2008) is McKellar’s thriller adaptation of the unforgettable José Saramago novel of the same name, in which an epidemic of white blindness strikes the people of an unnamed city. It stars Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo, and Gael García Bernal, among others.
Alam is a critically acclaimed literary novelist who develops intriguing and sharply observant fictional considerations of race and class. He’s known for imaginatively leaping into perspectives and bodies that seem to be other than his own, and that kind of risk-taking in truth-seeking lines up well with Nguyen’s. Alam wrote an astute piece about The Sympathizer’s sequel, The Committed, for the New York Review of Books.
Alam’s most recent novel is Entitlement, a psychological thriller of sorts that grapples with race, class, and what access to extreme wealth confers. Set in New York City, like much of Alam’s work, the novel centers on a white billionaire philanthropist’s young, ambitious, and privileged Black protégé, who makes a number of bad choices after gaining entrance into the billionaire’s world. Alam’s exquisite prior book was the surreal, apocalyptic Leave the World Behind, which Netflix adapted as a feature film starring Julia Roberts, Mahershala Ali, Ethan Hawke, and Myha’la. One of the surreal scenes—of hot-pink flamingos—feels as though it would be at home in Paolo Sorrentino’s gorgeous film The Great Beauty. Coincidentally, the book and adaptation share a faint conceptual resonance with the ordinary humanity faced with mysterious emergency conditions in McKellar’s Last Night and Blindness. Alam became known for writing from the perspectives of women in two earlier, accomplished books, That Kind of Mother and Rich and Pretty, about best friendship.
If you’ve finished Nguyen’s debut, there are a host of stunning projects you could turn to next. You could watch one of McKellar’s films or pick up one of Alam’s novels or The Committed. And be sure not to miss Tuesday night’s event, which will be fantastic.
Join us on January 28 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Nguyen will sit down with CBC host John Freeman and special guests McKellar and Alam to discuss The Sympathizer. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
