The Sorrow of War
Bao Ninh's The Sorrow of War, first published in Vietnam in 1990 and translated into English in 1994, is widely considered the great Vietnamese novel of the war the rest of the world calls Vietnam. Drawn from the author's own service in the Glorious 27th Youth Brigade, of which only ten members survived, the novel follows Kien, a soldier who lives through years of jungle combat and returns to a peacetime Hanoi he no longer recognizes. Working as a state archivist tasked with collecting the bones of the missing, Kien tries to write his way back to the boy he was before the war, and to Phuong, the lover who waited for him and could not be the same when he came home. Bao Ninh's narrative moves like memory itself, looping between the ambushes of the Jungle of Screaming Souls, the slow rot of barracks life, and the empty Hanoi nights of a man whose nation has called his sacrifice glorious and his grief inappropriate. The result is one of the rare anti-war novels written from the side that won, a book whose moral seriousness and broken-glass beauty have placed it alongside All Quiet on the Western Front and The Things They Carried as essential reading on the cost of any war.
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Kien is a North Vietnamese veteran who survived ten years in the jungle and returns to Hanoi after the war to a small flat and a typewriter. The novel moves between his childhood, his teenage love for Phuong, his platoon in the highlands, and a postwar job recovering the bones of dead soldiers.
The Sorrow of War was written by Bao Ninh, originally published in Vietnamese in 1990. The English translation was released in 1994. Bao Ninh is a Vietnamese novelist who fought in the Vietnam War. The metadata above lists Nghia M. Vo in error.
Partly. Bao Ninh fought in the People's Army of Vietnam during the war and drew extensively on his experience. The Sorrow of War is widely cited as one of the great novels of the conflict from the Vietnamese perspective.
The Sorrow of War is 214 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Sorrow of War takes most readers 3 to 5 hours to finish.
The Sorrow of War is a standalone novel by Nghia M. Vo, not part of a series.
The Sorrow of War is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
