Bao Ninh’s THE SORROW OF WAR, written in the stream of consciousness style, opens with the depiction of soldiers on a post war mission to collect the bones of fallen comrades, for reburial. Thus begins the narrative by Kien, a North Vietnamese soldier during the Vietnam War, chronicling his loss of innocence, his love and his anguish at the memories of war.
Kien rides in the truck searching for the remains of fallen soldiers in what he imagines as the “jungle of screaming souls ” and recalls that this is where the 27th Battalion was obliterated except for a handful of survivors. His flashbacks tie the novel together. The theme of these flashbacks centre around the love between Kien and his childhood sweetheart, Phuong. Kien writes a novel about it, then tries to burn it. A mute girl whom Kien sees when drunk, to whom he pours out his thoughts, obtains the text after his departure. Kien in the book reflects on his experiences and the many unacknowledged sacrifices, such as how acts of giving up her life to save Kien and his comrades from American soldiers, and acts of immorality and desecration, such as the objectification and treatment of a dead woman in the airport. The novel climaxes with Kien’s reflections on his first personal kill, which occurs after he witnesses Phuong’s rape. The novel ends with a passage by a new narrator, who explains that he received Kien’s novel from the mute girl.
Both American and Vietnamese cultural depictions of the Vietnam War tended to be full of romanticisation and stereotyping. THE SORROW OF WAR soars above all of this, moving backwards and forwards in time, and in and out of despair, dragging the reader down as the hero- loner leads one through his private hell in the highlands of Central Vietnam, or pulls one up when his spirits rise.
It is a fine war story and truely a marvellous read, frequently compared to All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarques. The book references the war of the 1960’s and 70’s, its unstructured but never rambling, intense, vivid, and empathtic portrayal of an emotionally traumatised person experiencing survivor’s guilt. The primary theme of the book involves an exploration of the suffering caused by war and the brief experiences of human contact theat give hope for transcending that suffering.
Eventually the narrative shifts its emphasis to the post-war present, when Kien had been fully demobilised from military duty and is struggling to rebuild both his life and personal identity in Hanoi, the city where he grew up. Narration shifts between distant past, near past and present as Kien experiences, surges of memory and feelings associated with combat and his relationship with Phuong, while he attempts to put the past behind him and get on with his life. His traumas lead to addiction to alcohol and cigarettes while being intensely engaged in recording and writing his experiences.
As the book reaches its climax, the past, the present lines converge, revealing Kien’s witnessing Phuong being raped, who then transforms, literally before his eyes, into a woman whose sexuality is her means of survival. In the final pages, the reader becomes aware of the narrator, who as Kien’s neighbour has attempted to put the manuscript he received from the Mute Girl, into some kind of coherent order to make it accessible and relatable to others.
This is without a doubt an hauntingly beautiful novel that manages to humanise completely a people who until now have been cast as robotic fanatics. This book should be required reading for anyone interested American politics or policy making.
Postscript: THE SORROW OF WAR was banned in North Vietnam for 15 years due to its critical, often brutal description of the war known in the country as the American War in Vietnam. Bao Ninh achieves a poetry of his own, a kind of slow and seeping pathos that permeates the book.
