The sorrow of war : a novel of North Vietnam

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 in 1990 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. The British newspaper The Independent judged it the Best Foreign Fiction book of 1994. 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. “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 IndependentBao Ninh was born in Hanoi in 1952. During the Vietnam War he served with the Glorious 27th Youth Brigade. Of the five hundred who went to war with the brigade in 1969, he is one of ten who survived. A huge bestseller in Vietnam, The Sorrow of War won The Independent Foreign Fiction Award for 1994. It is Bao Ninh’s first novel. The Sorrow of War - by turns bleak and poetic, pellucid and cunning - opens with Kien, an infantry cadre from Hanoi, engaged in the grim business of retrieving and burying the dead at the scene of one of the bloodiest battles of the war. From here, the novel ranges back to Kien's youth and the pains of adolescent love, and moves forward to his attempts, as a struggling writer in postwar Hanoi, to come to grips with the savageries he has witnessed, to make sense of death, love, and loss - and of his own survival. Phan Thanh Hao (trans.), Frank Palmos (ed.) 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 in 1990 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. The British newspaper The Independent judged it the Best Foreign Fiction book of 1994. The Vietnam War as seen through the eyes of a North Vietnamese infantryman. In a series of flashbacks, as he buries the dead following a battle, the narrator recounts his 10 years of service, the comrades he lost and the way the war ruined the love of his life. The author is a veteran of the NVA's Glorious 27th Youth Brigade, a 500-man unit from which only 10 men survived. He lives in Hanoi