Be Specific About Books To The Sorrow Of War: A Novel of North Vietnam
| Original Title: | Thân Phận Của Tình Yêu (The Fate of Love) |
| ISBN: | 1573225436 (ISBN13: 9781573225434) |
| Edition Language: | English |
| Characters: | Kien, Phuong |
| Literary Awards: | Independent Foreign Fiction Prize (1994), Sách Hay (2011), Nikkei Asia Prizes (2011), Giải thưởng Hội Nhà Văn Việt Nam (1991) |
Bảo Ninh
Paperback | Pages: 233 pages Rating: 4.04 | 5560 Users | 619 Reviews
Details About Books The Sorrow Of War: A Novel of North Vietnam
| Title | : | The Sorrow Of War: A Novel of North Vietnam |
| Author | : | Bảo Ninh |
| Book Format | : | Paperback |
| Book Edition | : | Deluxe Edition |
| Pages | : | Pages: 233 pages |
| Published | : | April 1st 1996 by Riverhead Books/The Berkley Publishing Group/Penguin Putnam Inc. (first published 1987) |
| Categories | : | Fiction. War. Historical. Historical Fiction. Cultural. Asia |
Commentary During Books The Sorrow Of War: A Novel of North Vietnam
The Future Lied To UsA reminiscence, rather than a memoir, tumbling between the time before war, eleven years of brutal fighting, and then its aftermath. Shifting from first to third person, with the occasional second person letter, the story is as unstructured as the lives involved. And none of it is politically correct: “No. The ones who loved war were not the young men, but the others like the politicians, middle-aged men with fat bellies and short legs. Not the ordinary people. The recent years of war had brought enough suffering and pain to last them a thousand years.”
At its simplest, this story is the universal one of the common soldier: an inexperienced young man dislocated from a normal life, and exposed to the horror of having to kill and watching others killed, seemingly endlessly. Inevitably he loses not only his civilized existence but his identity. Using drugs when he can find them and pure grit when he can’t, he manages to survive. But for what? His peace is as a worn out alcoholic, all his family, friends, and comrades dead. Unable to sustain any sort of intimate relationship, all he can do is remember. “This kind of peace? In this kind of peace it seems people have unmasked themselves and revealed their true, horrible selves. So much blood, so many lives were sacrificed for what?” His memory, particularly his memory of his own expectations, is the source of his malaise.
He writes as a form of therapy, to rid himself of the devils, his memories, that now constitute his personality. All he has is these devils, these ghosts, who appear in flashbacks, spontaneous violence, recurrent dreams of disaster and a depressive lethargy. Only by writing about them can he exorcise their power. He has been told by others who have been in his position, “After this hard-won victory fighters like you, Kien, will never be normal again. You won’t even speak with your normal voice, in the normal way again.”
So his challenge is to find a new voice, actually an entirely new personality represented by such a voice. Some voice other than “The way you speak in hell.” Incrementally he is able to find himself without forgetting what he has seen: “The tragedies of the war years have bequeathed to my soul the spiritual strength that allows me to escape the infinite present. The little trust and will to live that remains stems not from my illusions but from the power of my recall.” He realises that there is something within him waiting to be made visible: “There is a force at work in him that he cannot resist, as though it opposes every orthodox attitude taught him and it is now his task to expose the realities of war and to tear aside conventional images.”
This force reveals hard truths known to every common soldier in every war of history: “What remained was sorrow, the immense sorrow, the sorrow of having survived. The sorrow of war.” The only real result is sorrow, “Justice may have won, but cruelty, death and inhuman violence had also won... Losses can be made good, damage can be repaired and wounds will heal in time. But the psychological scars of the war will remain forever.”
And yet despite the unequal balance of cost and benefit, there is something else, a “spiritual beauty in the horrors of conflict,” without which “the war would have been another brutal, sadistic exercise.” Throughout his story Bao Ninh weaves a sort of lyrical spirituality which would be an obscenity if written by anyone who hadn’t been through the grinding mill of virtually the entire American War in Vietnam. “He saw his life as a river with himself standing unsteadily at the peak of a tall hill, silently watching his life ebb from him, saying farewell to himself. The flow of his life focused and refocused and each moment of that stream was recalled, each event, each memory was a drop of water in his nameless, ageless river.”
Eventually he emerges from the nihilism of his despair in the reading of his manuscript by another who, through it, feels he knows the author: “His spirit had not been eroded by a cloudy memory. He could feel happy that his soul would find solace in the fountain of sentiments from his youth. He returned time and time again to his love, his friendship, his comradeship, those human bonds which had all helped us overcome the thousand sufferings of the war.”
Memory had become more than sorrow; it also carried the joy of his youth - for the reader of his life if not for him. The future had lied but it did not destroy the past - for the reader who is in the present. Could it be that the only way that any life makes sense is after it’s over - and interpreted by someone else?
Rating About Books The Sorrow Of War: A Novel of North Vietnam
Ratings: 4.04 From 5560 Users | 619 ReviewsAssessment About Books The Sorrow Of War: A Novel of North Vietnam
The Future Lied To UsA reminiscence, rather than a memoir, tumbling between the time before war, eleven years of brutal fighting, and then its aftermath. Shifting from first to third person, with the occasional second person letter, the story is as unstructured as the lives involved. And none of it is politically correct: No. The ones who loved war were not the young men, but the others like the politicians, middle-aged men with fat bellies and short legs. Not the ordinary people. The recentFascinating, insightful, touching, poignant, tragic and sad. This novel is Vietnam's answer to All Quiet on the Western Front, being highly descriptive of a war in which the author participated.What makes it far more interesting is that he was in the North Vietnamese Army, the book offering a very different viewpoint to all the other books about the Vietnam conflict I have read.It proves (yet again) that whatever the rights and wrongs of the politics, when countries go to war, ordinary people
FINALLY finished this book! It started out really great but it grew increasingly confusing and boring and also I read this for school and I have a teacher who expects extremely thorough annotations so it was basically a torture to go through this book because I had to force myself to slave through it and jot down seemingly meaningful notes in the small margins and it quite possibly took me more than 24 hours straight to annotate the entire book because I remember slaving away for 4 hours each on
as fascinating as this novel is, i can't help feeling a bit disappointed with it now that i'm finished. to my western eyes, it's pretty unique - a diaristic, plot-less account of a north vietnamese soldier's hardships during a war i'm well-versed in seeing from the opposite perspective. i'm a bit ashamed to admit this, but i don't think i've ever read a vietnamese novel before, so the fact that a few areas didn't resonate with me may reflect my own ignorance about the culture the novel comes
I was lucky enough to find a special English copy full of marginalia at a second hand book stall on Nguyen Van Binh in Ho Chi Minh City (or Saigon).A Vietnamese person had been reading it and every space is filled with their handwriting in ink or pencil where they translated words and phrases.I found the story to be very powerful and tragic, showing how Kien and Phuongs lives were stolen by the war even though they survived it.I think it would have been beautiful if it ended on page 209 with the
The first half of this book read like an opium dream. The battles and the imagery from the Jungle of the Screaming Souls presented me with a very different perspective of the North Vietnamense soldier than what I thought it would be.In fact, my view of just about everything I thought I knew about North Vietnam from the mid-60's to the mid-70's was altered by this book.In the second half of the book there is a lot more focus on the main character (Kien) and his childhood sweetheart Phuong. Every
An unconventional, powerful novel about the Vietnam war.
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