The Sorrow of War: A Novel of North Vietnam

The Sorrow of War: A Novel of North Vietnam, by Bao Ninh, was first published in Vietnam in 1991; its first English translation came in 1993. Bao was born in Hanoi, Vietnam, in 1952. During the Vietnam War, he served with the Glorious 27th Youth Brigade. Of the 500 people who went to war with the brigade in 1969, he is one of only ten who survived. The Sorrow of War was originally published against government wishes in Vietnam because of its non-heroic, non-ideological tone.

The novel begins with Kien, the main character, as part of a Missing In Action team that is gathering the remains of bodies in the Jungle of Screaming Souls in 1975, after the Vietnam War has ended. While there, Kien remembers men he fought with and the terror and heartbreak of war. He recounts battles and boredom and all the ways he and his fellow soldiers tried to forget the war.

But after this recounting, the reader learns that Kien is not in the Jungle of Screaming Souls. It is not 1975. It is instead fourteen years after the war, and Kien, almost forty years old now, is writing a novel about the war and its effect on the people and the country. He says it is his sacred duty to finish his novel because he does not want history to forget the stories of the war.

Kien’s story are not only about the war. He recounts his days with Phuong, his childhood sweetheart, right before the war began, and how, even as the first shots were fired, their childhood was taken away from them. Everyone was affected by the war: Kien’s father, who burned his paintings and eventually let himself die; Phuong, who was raped by a sailor; Hoa, who sacrificed herself to save Kien; and dozens of others. He recounts, in ever-shifting perspectives and ever-changing timelines, how the war affected them all, from the soldiers in the Balcony Cafe who drink to forget, to the prostitutes on the streets of Hanoi.

Kien is trying to capture what war is, and for him, it is ever-deepening sorrow. He cannot remember anyone he loved without remembering how the war changed them. He cannot remember Hanoi without a before-and-after comparison. And he cannot remember any of the sacrifices of those around him without the sorrow setting in.

The only way he can cope—besides drinking, as the other soldiers do—is to write his novel. For Kien, it is an escape into the past. Though he writes about the battles and deaths, he also writes about the times when the men and women he knew and loved were alive. “Fate waited to take them from the terrible present back to the happy days of the past,” the author writes (227), and it is this past the author tries to capture.

In the last few pages, the author himself, Bao Ninh, steps into the novel. He claims he was only compiling it for Kien and that Kien is gone, but he believes Kien finally found some solace in his life “in the fountain of sentiments from his youth” (233). The author deliberately blurs the lines between fiction and nonfiction with his own insertion in the text. He also eschews chronological order in favor of the way memory works—how often it is circular, one memory leading to another and another until the original one circles back again.