The Sorrow of War Author:Bao Ninh, Frank Palmos (Editor), Vo Bang Thanh (Translator), Phan Thanh Hao (Translator), Katerina Pierce (Translator) Bao Ninh was born in Hanoi and 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 is his first novel. — The war in Vietnam has burned its brand so deep in film and fiction that it seemed ... more »there was nothing new to say about the bitter conflict. But, a handful of propaganda films apart, the voice of North Vietnam has been silent. Until now.
This extraordinary novel 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 this macabre scene, the novel ranges back to Kien's youth and the pains of adolescent love, and forward to his attempts, as a struggling writer in post-war Hanoi, to come to grips with his memories of the savageries of this corrosive war, to make sense of death, of love, of loss, of his own survival.
Kien brings to the page the skills that served him in warfare, learning to confront the mechanics of fiction as he had learned to strip his weapons, to work his way through narrative as he had learned to traverse the lethal jungle. But the battle with the written word, while it draws no blood, exacts its own price, leaves its own victims.
By turns lyrical and brutal, bleak and poetic, naive and cunning, The Sorrow of War eloquently confirms that in war, whoever wins, the casualty is humanity.« less