The French Legacy of Romance

Viet Thanh Nguyen's novel The Sympathizer won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Its follow-up takes the lead character to Parisian salons and an underworld of drug dealing so Free Thinking tracks the French connection through film, history and philosophy as Matthew Sweet is joined by Viet Thanh Nguyen, by film critic Phuong Le and by Peter Salmon - author of a biography of Derrida - he's been investigating the ideas of the Vietnamese thinker Tran Duc Thao who inspired some of Derrida's work.

The Sympathizer and the new novel The Committed by Viet Thanh Nguyen are out now. You can hear Phuong Le in a Free Thinking discussion about Marlene Dietrich https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000q8cq and about Billy Wilder https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000p1dx Peter Salmon's biography of Derrida is called An Event, Perhaps. You can hear him talking about that in a Free Thinking called Derrida and post truth https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000nc7t Free Thinking also has a playlist exploring different takes on the idea of Home and Belonging https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03mb66k

Producer: Harry Parker