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| Original Title: | Thân Phận Của Tình Yêu (The Fate of Love) |
| ISBN: | 1573225436 (ISBN13: 9781573225434) |
| Edition Language: | English |
| Characters: | Kien, Phuong |
| Literary Awards: | Independent Foreign Fiction Prize (1994), Sách Hay (2011), Nikkei Asia Prizes (2011), Giải thưởng Hội Nhà Văn Việt Nam (1991) |
Bảo Ninh
Paperback | Pages: 233 pages Rating: 4.04 | 5560 Users | 619 Reviews
Point About Books The Sorrow Of War: A Novel of North Vietnam
| Title | : | The Sorrow Of War: A Novel of North Vietnam |
| Author | : | Bảo Ninh |
| Book Format | : | Paperback |
| Book Edition | : | First Edition |
| Pages | : | Pages: 233 pages |
| Published | : | April 1st 1996 by Riverhead Books/The Berkley Publishing Group/Penguin Putnam Inc. (first published 1987) |
| Categories | : | Fiction. War. Historical. Historical Fiction. Cultural. Asia |
Description To Books The Sorrow Of War: A Novel of North Vietnam
The Future Lied To Us A reminiscence, rather than a memoir, tumbling between the time before war, eleven years of brutal fighting, and then its aftermath. Shifting from first to third person, with the occasional second person letter, the story is as unstructured as the lives involved. And none of it is politically correct: “No. The ones who loved war were not the young men, but the others like the politicians, middle-aged men with fat bellies and short legs. Not the ordinary people. The recent years of war had brought enough suffering and pain to last them a thousand years.” At its simplest, this story is the universal one of the common soldier: an inexperienced young man dislocated from a normal life, and exposed to the horror of having to kill and watching others killed, seemingly endlessly. Inevitably he loses not only his civilized existence but his identity. Using drugs when he can find them and pure grit when he can’t, he manages to survive. But for what? His peace is as a worn out alcoholic, all his family, friends, and comrades dead. Unable to sustain any sort of intimate relationship, all he can do is remember. “This kind of peace? In this kind of peace it seems people have unmasked themselves and revealed their true, horrible selves. So much blood, so many lives were sacrificed for what?” His memory, particularly his memory of his own expectations, is the source of his malaise. He writes as a form of therapy, to rid himself of the devils, his memories, that now constitute his personality. All he has is these devils, these ghosts, who appear in flashbacks, spontaneous violence, recurrent dreams of disaster and a depressive lethargy. Only by writing about them can he exorcise their power. He has been told by others who have been in his position, “After this hard-won victory fighters like you, Kien, will never be normal again. You won’t even speak with your normal voice, in the normal way again.” So his challenge is to find a new voice, actually an entirely new personality represented by such a voice. Some voice other than “The way you speak in hell.” Incrementally he is able to find himself without forgetting what he has seen: “The tragedies of the war years have bequeathed to my soul the spiritual strength that allows me to escape the infinite present. The little trust and will to live that remains stems not from my illusions but from the power of my recall.” He realises that there is something within him waiting to be made visible: “There is a force at work in him that he cannot resist, as though it opposes every orthodox attitude taught him and it is now his task to expose the realities of war and to tear aside conventional images.” This force reveals hard truths known to every common soldier in every war of history: “What remained was sorrow, the immense sorrow, the sorrow of having survived. The sorrow of war.” The only real result is sorrow, “Justice may have won, but cruelty, death and inhuman violence had also won... Losses can be made good, damage can be repaired and wounds will heal in time. But the psychological scars of the war will remain forever.” And yet despite the unequal balance of cost and benefit, there is something else, a “spiritual beauty in the horrors of conflict,” without which “the war would have been another brutal, sadistic exercise.” Throughout his story Bao Ninh weaves a sort of lyrical spirituality which would be an obscenity if written by anyone who hadn’t been through the grinding mill of virtually the entire American War in Vietnam. “He saw his life as a river with himself standing unsteadily at the peak of a tall hill, silently watching his life ebb from him, saying farewell to himself. The flow of his life focused and refocused and each moment of that stream was recalled, each event, each memory was a drop of water in his nameless, ageless river.” Eventually he emerges from the nihilism of his despair in the reading of his manuscript by another who, through it, feels he knows the author: “His spirit had not been eroded by a cloudy memory. He could feel happy that his soul would find solace in the fountain of sentiments from his youth. He returned time and time again to his love, his friendship, his comradeship, those human bonds which had all helped us overcome the thousand sufferings of the war.” Memory had become more than sorrow; it also carried the joy of his youth - for the reader of his life if not for him. The future had lied but it did not destroy the past - for the reader who is in the present. Could it be that the only way that any life makes sense is after it’s over - and interpreted by someone else?Rating About Books The Sorrow Of War: A Novel of North Vietnam
Ratings: 4.04 From 5560 Users | 619 ReviewsPiece About Books The Sorrow Of War: A Novel of North Vietnam
A rare insight into the mind of a North Vietnam soldier. He seemed driven by a duty to be a good soldier, a mate but realistic that they were fighting a more well equipped enemy so life was likely to be short. There was no ideology driven mantra. His experiences in the war were brutal and after the war he struggles with his experiences, of lives lost and finding a future. Interesting that the returned soldiers received the same disinterested reception as their American and allies received.TheI had always felt guilty that I had not read such an important work of fiction about the Vietnam War. So when I was at Tan Son Nhat airport looking for some reading materials to buy before I boarded the plane back to Singapore, I asked the shop attendant:- Chị ơi có cuốn "Nỗi buồn chiến tranh" không chị? (Hello, do you have the book "The sorrow of war"?)Then she replied:- Dạ hông có chị ơi em xin lỗi (We don't have that book, I am sorry). I was very surprised to hear that, because I knew that
"The novel was the ash from this exorcism of devils."At all turns a tremendous and ghastly novel of war and most especially its aftermath. This might very well be the best "war" novel I've ever read, though it is far more about piecing together one's experience in war and trying to sift through it for a sign of how one should go on.Kien is the thinly-disguised author who, I'm assuming, drew off his own horrific experience over the decade of the Vietnam War, as a soldier from the North. Kien
FINALLY finished this book! It started out really great but it grew increasingly confusing and boring and also I read this for school and I have a teacher who expects extremely thorough annotations so it was basically a torture to go through this book because I had to force myself to slave through it and jot down seemingly meaningful notes in the small margins and it quite possibly took me more than 24 hours straight to annotate the entire book because I remember slaving away for 4 hours each on
Sometimes when you read a book in translation, it's hard to tell who to congratulate on a job well done. Is it the author or the translator? In the case of the Sorrow of War, the credit most certainly goes to the author, Bao Ninh. It is amazing that this book can be some horrifying and heart-wrenching through such a poor translation. When I was in Vietnam in 2001, I saw the author speak about this book to our class. he was quiet and soft-spoken. He wasn't exactly popular with the Vietnamese
The sorrow of war inside a soldiers 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. It was a sadness, a missing, a pain which could send one soaring back into the past. The sorrow of the battlefield could not normally be pinpointed to one particular event, or even one person. If you focused on any one event it would soon become a tearing pain.The next book in my project to read all the past winners of the
As the title makes clear, this is not a book you can read without some real emotional work; Bao Ninh, pen name of a North Vietnamese veteran, barely mentions the invading Americans, except in a few searing passages that come through with a cinematic calm and vividness. His overall subject is what war does to the people who fight it, and the novel is in part about the writing of the novel, the kind of approach that usually fails, at least in my estimation, but here works oddly well. It helps to
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