Book Review: Sorrow of War
The Sorrow of War
Bao Ninh
Year: 1991, (in Vietnam) 1993 (translated into English
Genre: Fiction—War
The Sorrow of War is Bao Ninh’s first novel, and it is the better anti-war novel I’ve ever read. He wrote it about his experiences during the Vietnam War. In essence you could call it a memoir, but I or the author don’t think so. Since it’s based off his experiences, he uses that setting to construct a story.
So what is the story and writing style? Well, to answer the first question, the story Is about a man named Kien, who is writing this novel from post-war Vietnam in Hanoi, so the setting maybe 1980..? I don’t know for certain, however he writes it in a stream-of-consciousness format which makes it for easy reading, but often-times hard to follow because he flows in and out of the combat scenes to his youth, to the city life.
The novel starts in a combat scene, and you get a feel for what the Vietnam War was like for the North Vietnamese fighting in the jungles. You sense the jungle while reading the first 5 pages of the novel. As you progress into the storyline, Kien’s character shifts from being a soldier to being a civilian who is hunched in his apartment writing his combat memoir, to being young again with his middle-school class being attacked, which drove him to fight, and five years later he signed up for the Army to go fight. He makes his trek down South where he participates in the Battle of Saigon and takes part of the celebrations thereafter. Afterwards we see his trek back North to begin his studies and ultimately his career as a writer.
A transition from being a soldier to being a writer and that journey occurs, as well as seeing his finding his first love, of which during the last half (more than half, about 75% of the entire book) shows him chasing after this girl and their romantic encounters. I won’t spoil it any further, though the ending is somewhat melancholy, a misled melancholy of a youth wasted.
If you like All Quiet on the Western Front you will like The Sorrow of War.
8/10 would recommend.