The Sorrow of War : A Novel of North Vietnam

During the Vietnam War Bao Ninh served with the Glorious 27th Youth Brigade. Of the five hundred men who went to war with the brigade in 1969, he is one of only ten who survived. The Sorrow of War is his autobiographical novel. Kien works in a unit that recovers soldiers’ corpses. Revisiting the sites of battles raises emotional ghosts for him and the memory of war scenes are juxtaposed with dreams & remembrances of his childhood sweetheart. The Sorrow of War burns the tragedy of war in our minds. Praise “The first critical portrayal of life in the North Vietnamese army ever to appear in Vietnam . . . The censors were evidently moved by the book’s unflinching sincerity and Ninh’s literary gifts.”—Time“Vaults over all the American fiction that came out of the Vietnam War to take its place alongside the greatest war novel of the century, All Quiet on the Western Front. And this is to understate its qualities, for, unlike All Quiet, it is a novel about much more than war. A book about writing, about lost youth, it is also a beautiful, agonizing love story.”—The Independent“Dramatic . . . Chronicle[s] the wrecked lives of North Vietnamese soldiers who enter the war with blazing idealism, only to sink deeper into disillusionment & pessimism as everything they know falls apart around them . . . Will force American readers to acknowledge how little they still understand of the long war that left such a legacy of grief & guilt in their own country.”—The Washington Post Author Bao Ninh was born in Hanoi in 1952. A huge bestseller in Vietnam, The Sorrow of War won The Independent Foreign Fiction Award for 1994. It is Bao Ninh’s first novel. Bao Ninh, a former North Vietnamese soldier, provides a strikingly honest look at how the Vietnam War forever changed his life, his country, and the people who live there. Originally published against government wishes in Vietnam because of its nonheroic, non-ideological tone, The Sorrow of War has won worldwide acclaim and become an international bestseller Annotation. The first novel of the Vietnam War written from the point of view of the North Vietnamese, The Sorrow of War has been hailed by critics not only as the best novel to emerge from the Vietnam experience, but as one of the greatest war novels of the century During the Vietnam War Bao Ninh served with the Glorious 27th Youth Brigade. Of the five hundred men who went to war with the brigade in 1969, he is one of only ten who survived. The Sorrow of War is his autobiographical novel. Kien works in a unit that recovers soldiers' corpses. Revisiting the sites of battles raises emotional ghosts for him and the memory of war scenes are juxtaposed with dreams and remembrances of his childhood sweetheart. The Sorrow of War burns the tragedy of war in our minds.