The Sorrow of War
A successful short story writer focusing primarily on stories about the war, Bảo Ninh shot into the limelight with his debut novel, Thân phận của tình yêu, (The Destiny of Love) published 1991 in Hanoi. An English translation by Frank Palmos and Phan Thanh Hao was published in 1994, with the title The Sorrow of War, which became a widely acclaimed novel, with some critics placing the work among the most moving war novels of all time. Counterfeits of the English language edition then became widely available in Vietnam for the tourist trade.[1]
Sorrow of War is a nonlinear narrative by Kien, a North Vietnamese soldier during the Vietnam War, chronicling his loss of innocence, his love, and his anguish (sorrow and sadness) at the memories of war, a short summary of the novel follows:
Kien is a soldier who seems to have a never-ending source of luck in his battles, for whenever all of the troops in his platoon die, he survives. The novel starts with him riding in a MIA Remains-Gathering Truck charged with the collection of bodies in the Jungle of Screaming Souls where Kien's first team of soldiers, the 27th Battalion was eliminated except for him. This scene begins many flashbacks that tie together the novel and are almost unable to be discerned for their chronological order. The story that the reader learns to follow is that of the love affair between Kien and his childhood sweetheart, Phuong, who he constantly references at the beginning of the story but only near the end do the largest events in their history take place. The subject then falls upon the novel being written by Kien and how he seems fated to write it by his survival from these battles and he feels that its completion will bring solace. Once the novel is completed, a mute girl who Kien began seeing when drunk to use to bounce his ideas off, gained a hold of the text while Kien was attempting to burn the pages. This burning of all his work is an allusion to what is told of Kien's artist father who fell into a similar slump after Kien's mother's divorce and burned all of the paintings he had painted over the years. The novel ends with an excerpt from a new narrator who is said to have found Kien's novel from this mute woman. He talks about the nonsensical order and grave subject matter but also its entrancing nature and how he felt that it needed to be published.
The novel weaves back and forth between tales of unfulfilled love and the narrative of war, which fails to fulfill its own objectives. The tale is hauntingly told, verging on poetry:
The sorrow of war inside a soldier's mind was in a strange way similar to the sorrow of love. It was a kind of nostalgia, like the immense sadness of a world at dusk.
At one level, the novel can be said to be about effects of war on people, and especially how it defeats the human capacity for love:
It was hard to remember a time when his whole personality and character had been intact, a time before the cruelty and the destruction of war had warped his soul. A time when he had been deeply in love, passionate, aching with desire, hilariously frivolous and light-hearted, or quickly depressed by love and suffering. Or blushing in embarrassment. When he, too, was worthy of being a lover and in love …
But war was a world with no home, no roof, no comforts. A happy journey, of endless drifting. War was a world without real men, without real women, without feeling.
On another level, it is about the horrors, and the eventual futility of war. The novel is openly critical of communist propaganda, e.g., the slogans that ban young people from enjoying sex, love, and marriage - these are the "Three Don'ts" in the pre-war communist heterodoxy. At another point, Kien sympathizes with the owner of a coffee plantation in the South, who says he does not care for the government, neither north nor south, the main aim is that people should be happy. There is no joy even in the eventual victory, only grim fatigue among the heaped up corpses at Saigon airport after the American withdrawal.
Possibly due to these nuances, the novel was briefly banned after its release in 1991. However, with the winds of liberalization sweeping Vietnam in the 1990s, the immensely popular book could not be suppressed.
The book has also gained wide readership in the South where it is one of the few books to present the story from the other side of the Civil War. Admirably, Bảo Ninh does this without blaming the other side in any way. Another work in this vein is Novel without a Name by Duong Thu Huong.
In 2005, it was republished in Vietnam under its original name, The Understanding of Love (Thân phận của tình yêu); another edition in 2006 adopted the Vietnamese version of the English title.
(Wikipedia)
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