Product Description

This is the semi-autobiographical account of a soldier's experiences. The hero of the story, Kien, is a captain. After 10 years of war and months as a MIA body-collector, Kien suffers a nervous breakdown in Hanoi as he tries to re-establish a relationship with his former sweetheart.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #133650 in Books
• Published on: 1997-08-27
• Released on: 1997-08-27
• Original language: Vietnamese
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Kien, the protagonist of this rambling and sometimes nearly incoherent but emotionally gripping account of the Vietnam war, is a 10-year veteran whose experiences bear a striking similarity to those of the author, a Hanoi writer who fought with the Glorious 27th Youth Brigade. The novel opens just after the war, with Kien working in a unit that recovers soldiers' corpses. Revisiting the sites of battles raises emotional ghosts for him, "a parade of horrific memories" that threatens his sanity, and he finds that writing about those years is the only way to purge them. Juxtaposing battle scenes with dreams and childhood remembrances as well as events in Kien's postwar life, the book builds to a climax of brutality. A trip to the front with Kien's childhood sweetheart ends with her noble act of sacrifice, and it becomes clear to the reader that, in Vietnam, purity and innocence exist only to be besmirched. Covering some of the same physical and thematic terrain as Novel Without a Name (see above), The Sorrow of War is often as chaotic in construction as the events it describes. In fact, it is untidy and uncontrolled, like the battlefield it conveys. The point of view slips willy-nilly from the third person to the first, without any clear semblance of organization. The inclusion of a deaf mute who falls for Kien, and acts for a while as a witness to his life, seems gratuitous. The faults of this book are also its strengths, however. Its raggedness aptly evokes the narrator's feverish view of a dangerous and unpredictable world. And its language possesses a ferocity of expression that strikes the reader with all the subtlety of a gut-punch. Polishing this rough jewel would, strangely, make it less precious.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
These two novelists, both of whom fought for North Vietnam, offer American readers a startlingly different perspective on the war.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
A novel addition to fiction from the Indochina conflict, this quasi-autobiographical story depicts a North Vietnamese infantryman trying to purge his grisly memories through writing. Sitting in his dingy Hanoi room, drinking day after day away, the central character, Kien, records in no set order his enlistment into the army, the bombing of his troop train, hellish firefights and napalming in the Central Highlands (an area superstitiously dubbed by Kien's comrades the "Jungle of the Screaming Souls"), his escape from an American patrol after the Tet offensive of '68, combat in Saigon's fall in '75, and his memory-piquing work on a postwar MIA detail. Each chunk of experience jostles the other, an intentional echo of the writer's struggle to describe the chaotic, while simultaneously attempting to find his own authorial voice. Thus Bao Ninh's work is half about war. If there is a message, it is that a survivor's reconciliation with savage memory is impossible--perhaps not the most original idea in war novels, but one worth hearing from the ex-enemy. Gilbert Taylor

Customer Reviews

Marine Corps Vietnam Veteran
In 1965, I went to Vietnam as an 18-year old Marine private and spent a full year's tour in operations against both North Vietnamese regular forces and the Viet Cong. I survived okay, never got wounded. I returned to the US and spent three years stateside and after reenlistment (surely a sign of mental illness, NOBODY in the Marine Corps in their right mind reenlisted during the Vietnam War years), I spent a year in Vietnamese language school in Arlington, Virginia, studying the Hanoi dialect. I went back to Vietnam in 1969 as an interrogator-translator and spent a year with the Fifth Marines in the An Hoa basin, made famous, incidentally, by James Webb's masterpiece of war-"Fields of Fire". In any event, I found myself face to face with North Vietnamese soldiers and actually able to communicate with them in their own language. As the year went by, simply by virtue of constant contact, I found myself growing fairly adept with the language. Many of my interrogations were conducted out in the field, usually at the company level, and with a great deal of haste, considering the hostile situation we were in. However, if I was conducting the interrogation at the regimental base camp and had the time, I would ask more questions of the men whom we had captured and began to ask them of their lives before being sent to South Vietnam. Those that would talk to me (not all did, naturally) revealed themselves to be just human beings like the rest of us and felt incredible attachments to their families whom they had left behind. In 1992, I was still on active duty, but this time in the Air Force, as a language instructor at the Air Force Academy, when I was asked to return to Vietnam and work in the MIA program. Going back after over 20 years, I was surprised that by virtue of my dormant but still functional Vietnamese language ability, I was still able to talk to many people about the war and how it had affected them. Until now, I have read no literary work that encompassed all the emotions that seemed to be just below the surface in the North Vietnamese veterans whom I met during my third year in Vietnam. Bao Ninh's excellent work "The Sorrow of War" probes into the mind of that other "Vietnam veteran" and reveals that all veterans of sustained combat share many of the cascading emotions that such suffering generates. Many times I saw faces on the streets of Hanoi that reflected the same emotions that I saw etched on the faces of my fellow Marines after a long operation. These same emotions are revealed in the faces of my fellow veterans over thirty years after our passage through fire in Vietnam. This is a book for all time and surely ranks up there with "All Quiet on the Western Front" and "A Farewell to Arms." A literary masterpiece that will touch you whether or not Vietnam was in your past or still in your present.

A haunting memoir of the War.
The author was a North Vietnamese "bo doi" who was sent south to liberate Saigon. He participated in many battles in central Vietnam.

The world of the "bo doi" like that of any soldier was dominated by fears of death, desertion, drug use, and nightmares. Ghosts haunted them almost daily and forests scared them.

Despite their sacrifices, they did not get any recognition when they came home from the war: no drums, no music and had to resign to live with "broken dreams and with pain". The stress of the war was too much for many of them: they got drunk, fought with their wives or girl friends, experienced nightmares, wild mood changes, and rage.

They suffered from the full range of post traumatic stress disorders American soldiers were experiencing on their return from the war. And above all, they questioned themselves whether the war was worth it.

the power of memory
It's Wilfred Owen reincarnated in a prose that is at once a searing recount of the inhumanity of mass violence and a tale of redemption and reappropriation of the collective self against the madness of war. The seemingly tortured narrative flow mirrors the author's own pain in his attempts to come to terms with the loss war visits on its victims. The book is a poignant universal call to end, once and for all, the dark clouds of machine gun fire.