The Sorrow of War- Bao Ninh (1994)

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The Sorrow of War was the first war story to be published in Vietnam after the end of the ten-year American War to paint a brutal, hopeless depiction of war without patriotism or heroism. It was ground-breaking at its publication and remains harrowing today.  The story is that of Kien, a soldier for the North Vietnamese Army who is nicknamed ‘Sorrowful Spirit’, but it is really the story of a generation of soldiers from both sides and of how the barbarism of war destroys youth, hope and passion.  Despite being a talented soldier, Kien is so damaged by the brutalities of war that he has witnessed that his wish is “to die quietly, sharing the fate of an insect or an ant”. But he survived, to become a wandering veteran in the lonely post-war peace.

The novel was first published in Vietnam in 1991 and became hugely popular with former soldiers who identified with the suffering of the protagonist. But it was less popular with the authorities, and was condemned by the national writers’ union for its unpatriotic and anti-communist allusions. Ninh has stayed in Vietnam despite the sensitivity of his work, although the novel is known by another, less striking title, ‘The Destiny of Love’, in its home country. The English version, translated by Frank Palmos, an Australian veteran of the Vietnam War, and Phan Thanh Hao, was first published in 1994. The same year, the translation was named Best Foreign Book by the Independent and in 2010 the Society of Authors of London declared it one of the ‘Best 50 Translations’ of the twentieth century.

There are two parallel tragedies in this story. The first is the futility, the evil and the suffering of war. The second is the lost love between Kien and his childhood sweetheart Phuong, a heart-rending romance that is unfulfilled and inevitably doomed. The author is evasive about the relationship between the two until the final pages, when a brutal episode that tore the two lovers apart is finally revealed. Kien writes that he had only had two loves in his life- Phuong before the war and Phuong after the war. It was the war that changed them both so that they could never be together again. “The sorrow of war inside a soldier's heart 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.” writes Ninh.

The novel is likely to be heavily based on personal experiences. Bao Ninh entered the war against America in 1969 with the Glorious 27^th Youth Brigade, at the age of seventeen. Of the five hundred in the brigade, he was one of ten who survived. This fate is shared with his protagonist Kien, who vividly recalls the bloody fighting in the Jungle of Screaming Souls that claimed the lives of so many of his comrades. In his lonely post-war life, Kien is haunted by memories of war and struggles to find meaning for his existence, a survival dependent on the sacrifices of others. His refuge becomes a long, disjointed manuscript that he works on every night in his messy Hanoi apartment, fuelled by alcohol and a need to remember his past in order to put it behind him. Like the author, Kien had written short stories and essays, but his manuscript became his greatest challenge, something that “brought him to the brink of insanity”. When he had finished his writing, Kien simply left his apartment, his door open, the pages blowing out into the corridor and down the stairs.

To what extent Ninh wrote this novel for purely personal reasons, as his character wrote his manuscript, is difficult to define. The narrative is non-linear and without chapters- an extended stream of recollections. At times there are clumsy repetitions that make the writing seem lazy, but mostly it is well-written and hauntingly described. Despite the huge commercial success of his first novel, Ninh is reluctant to publish a second novel, Steppe, which has already been completed, as he feels “it’s not natural like it was before”.

The Sorrow of War has been hugely popular both in Vietnam and internationally, often compared to Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front as one of the greatest war novels ever written. The scenes of battles and their aftermaths in the rainy jungles are very evocative, and the overall effect of the novel is truly heart-breaking. There is no hope, no reconciliation. Kien lost his youth and innocence to a war that consumed twenty years or more of his life, including his post-war years spent alone and without occupation, in which time he could only ever think of the past. The story is not always gripping to read and the structure sometimes seems chaotic, but it is moving nonetheless. A disappointment for me was the closing pages of the novel, in which the narrator collects the manuscript and describes in length his difficulty in assembling the pages and making sense of the anecdotes, finally coming to realise that he had known Kien as a soldier. I felt this was needless and took away from the poignancy of the final sequences of the story. Overall it has not been a particularly useful book to study for the purpose of my project, but on a personal level I have been very moved and touched by it.

A final strength of this novel is that is highlights perfectly the tragic futility of the American mission in Vietnam and the scars that remain as a result, without explicitly mentioning this. The anti-war message is expressed through Ninh’s portrayal of a distinct form of sorrow that permeates the heart of a soldier. These are subjects that are not openly spoken about in Vietnam today, and with ever-warming relations between Vietnam and the US, are less likely to be tolerated. Perhaps this is another reason why Ninh is reluctant to publish his second novel. But it is crucial that these stories are not forgotten.