The Sorrow of War | 
|  | | | Title: | The Sorrow of War | | Author: | Bao Ninh | | Publisher: | Riverhead Trade | | Type: | Book / Paperback | | Publication Date: | 01 April, 1996 | | ISBN / ISBN-13: | 1573225436 / 9781573225434 | | List Price: | $14.00 | | You Save: | $2.80 | | Amazon Price: | $11.20 | |
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Product Description
A novel of the Vietnam War is written from the perspective of the North Vietnamese, profiles human characters who are wrenched by the same pain and fear as their enemies, and follows the hero's ten-year separation from his loved ones. Reprint. NYT.
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Customer Reviews:
• Sorrow Indeed! 04 July, 2008
Bao Ninh's book is a difficult read, due in part to the translation, I suspect. Other reviewers have also made this observation. The book offers a rare look at the war from the view of an NVA soldier. Ninh writes in a highly unusual style -- difficult to understand without a good deal of thought. Duong Tu Huong, another well-known Vietnamese writer of Ninh's generation, is more accessible for Western readers in my judgment. The veteran who narrates this book is a tortured soul, maybe not entirely sane. Unlike most Vietnamese, he is cut off from a living community. What he has are his memories and the ghosts of his friends. He is memorable, disturbing, but not easy to know.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A1AXID4B1PGONV
• A Must Read! 07 January, 2008
If you want to understand what it was like to fight the war from the other side, The Sorrow of War is a must read. The author, Bao Ninh, a North Vietnamese regular, fought for ten years, not 365 days. This book puts a face on those nameless NVA soldiers who died in what the Vietnamese call "The American War." Bao Ninh is the Tim O'Brien of Vietnam and the two novels - The Sorrow of War and The Things They Carried - are all you need to understand the life of the grunt and the effects of war on the soldiers of both sides.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A2X4ED2DK624OV
• The "all Quiet On The Western Front" Of The Vietnam War 03 October, 2008
Like several other reviewers, I bought a cheap ripoff copy of this book from a street peddler (in my case a one-legged woman obviously of an age to have been a victim of the war herself) in Saigon last week. I originally bought it as a charity contribution to her, but when I started reading it on the plane coming home, I literally couldn't sleep until I finished it. It's an astonishingly honest and brutal depiction of the tragedy of a North Vietnam soldier desensitized to his own humanity after ten years at war.
It's about time that the world woke up to the universal suffering of soldiers on all sides of a conflict, and this book ought to be required reading for anyone considering a "career" in the military.
I especially recommend it to my fellow Vietnam veterans; Bao Ninh truly is our "brother in arms", regardless of the fact that he was on the other side.
Highly recommended.
Dennis Mansker, author of A Bad Attitude: A Novel from the Vietnam War and proud member of Veterans for Peace and Vietnam Veterans Against the War.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A5U5WI5I92Y61
• A Human Being's Duty On This Earth Is To Live, Not To Kill 04 May, 2008
In his novel in a novel Bao Ninh gives us a rare insight into the war scene of those who beat the Americans and their allies in Vietnam. His sometimes brutally violent and emotional picture shows that war everywhere is a `Jungle of Screaming Souls', causing psychological ruin and familial and social destruction. For the rest of their lives, it will leave deep inextinguishable scars in those who were lucky to survive
The horror scenes resemble pictures of Hieronymus Bosch: `only his skeleton was complete, like that of a frog thrown into a mud patch. Crows had pecked away Car's face; his mouth was full of mud and rotting leaves.'
It is a world of hunger, malaria, ulcers, hallucinations and nightmares (`groups of headless black American soldiers carrying lanterns aloft'); not only of heroic battles, but also of desertions and political indoctrination (`the anti-intellectual atmosphere of the state ideologies').
The losses are tremendous: `the short story of my life. First my brothers, then my mother, then my husband, then my son.'
After the war, integration in the civil society is difficult: `impoverishes demobilized soldiers, playing cards, smoking pot and other weeds, most of them unemployed.' Family lives and loves from before the war are completely shattered.
For Bao Ninh, `the divine war had paid him for all his suffering and losses with more suffering and losses at home.'
He rote this book, `to rid myself of these devils, to put my tormented soul finally to rest instead of letting it float in a pool of shame and sorrow.'
This `Path of no Glory' should not be missed.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A12A08OL0TZY0W
• First Novel Intrigues, Then Falls Into Disarray 17 November, 2008
The Sorrow of War is Ninh's first novel, and it remains at the grade of an author still grappling with technique and style. This novel about the Vietnam War is a halting creation, a confused jumble of narratives which fail to adhere. There are several disjointed themes in the novel: Kien the soldier at war, Kien the depressed post-war author, and Kien the lover. These strands are awkwardly woven together, and further confused by constant chronological switching.
The novel provides scant guidance as to its whereabouts or its reasoning: the reader is thrust here and there in Kien's life with little purpose. The problems with Ninh's temporal switching are compounded when he takes us to very different moments in the three strands: the early soldier as opposed to the seasoned one, the young lover as opposed to the heartbroken one, and so forth. In a better crafted novel, such leaps in time help to explain and deepen a character and a plot. In The Sorrow of War, the novel becomes less illuminating as it progresses.
The strength of the novel lies in its first section. Ninh plunges us into a war more horrifying than the darkest nightmare. These pages are written with great feeling and skill, and bring forth some understanding of the atrocities suffered by the Vietnamese people. These pages alone are important. It is a pity that the author could not sustain these elegantly gut-wrenching talents over the course of the novel.
Instead, Ninh takes us into post-war Hanoi and into the troubled mind of the veteran. One cannot help but see parallels in the experiences of American soldiers: depression, alcohol abuse, violence, nostalgia, and endlessly active memory. Alas, like Kien returning from war, the novel begins to unravel. Awkwardly Kien the writer is introduced. This change is jolting and awkward. Kien the author cannot figure out how to write his novel: clearly the problem was autobiographical.
More problematically still is the novel's lurching transition to romance. Strangely, Kien's nostalgia for his teenage lover Phuong takes over the book's last one hundred pages. It is yet another clumsy change. Worse than the transitions, though, is Ninh's view of romance and women. Ninh's thoughts on romance are masculinist and oafish: "girls" are mostly subjects of the male gaze, and of little other interest. The damning moment of the novel arrives when Phuong is improbably gang raped before Kien's eyes. Like the teenage Kien, Ninh handles the rape badly. It proves to be the final undoing of a novel that began so well.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A3FBU2QDUN0KFQ
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