Title: The Sorrow of War Author: Bao Ninh Creation Date: 1991 Location: Vietnam Collection: One Book Per Country
Brief
The Sorrow of War was published in Vietnamese as Nỗi buồn chiến tranh by the Writers' Association Publishing House in Hanoi in 1990, where it won the Writers' Association of Vietnam Prize for Fiction. An English translation by Frank Palmos, revised by the author, was published by Secker and Warburg in London in 1994. Its author, Bảo Ninh, was born in 1952 in Hanoi, served in the Glorious 27th Youth Brigade of the North Vietnamese Army from 1969 to 1975, and was one of ten survivors from an original brigade of five hundred soldiers. He has published almost nothing of comparable length since this novel, which appeared when he was thirty-eight.
The novel's initial Vietnamese publication was surrounded by controversy. It was recognized as a masterwork but also as a deviation from the officially sanctioned literature of Vietnamese socialism, which was expected to treat the war as a story of collective heroism and political liberation. The Sorrow of War treats the war as a tragedy — as something that, whatever its historical justification, destroyed enormous numbers of people in ways that no political narrative could redeem. This was not officially encouraged. The novel was subsequently suppressed for several years before being rehabilitated.
The novel follows Kien, a veteran writer living in postwar Hanoi, who is attempting to write a novel about the war. The narrative moves non-linearly — from the present of the late 1970s back through the war years and further back to Kien's childhood and adolescence in Hanoi before 1965 — and its fractured chronology is both a formal choice and a symptom: this is what traumatic memory does to time, and the novel's form enacts what it is describing.
Bảo Ninh writes from the North Vietnamese side — a perspective that was almost entirely absent from English-language war literature up to this point — and his account of the war is neither an apologia for Vietnamese communism nor a simple condemnation of American imperialism, but something more honest and more disturbing: a reckoning with the cost of the war to the people who fought it, regardless of the political analysis of why the war happened.
The novel's international reception was significant. In a genre — Vietnam War fiction — dominated by American perspectives, Bảo Ninh's novel arrived as an act of rebalancing: here were the Vietnamese people, not as silent victims or communist automatons but as fully realized human beings with interior lives as complex as any American soldier's.
The Country
The Vietnam Bảo Ninh renders is not one country but several, layered in Kien's fractured memory. There is the Hanoi of the early 1960s — tree-lined boulevards inherited from the French, the particular light of autumn on Hoàn Kiếm Lake, the neighbourhood where Kien and Phuong grew up together in the intimate geography of a city that had not yet been bombed. There is the Central Highlands — the Jungle of Screaming Souls — where the canopy is so dense that rain takes minutes to reach the ground and the dead lie in positions the living cannot rearrange because there are too many of them. And there is postwar Hanoi, a city of rationed electricity and crowded apartments and veterans drinking rice wine in rooms where the war has not ended because nothing has replaced it.
The novel's Vietnam is defined by its sounds: the particular whine of American helicopters, which Kien hears in his sleep years after the war; the monsoon rain on jungle leaves, which is also the sound of concealment; the silence of Hanoi at dawn, which in the pre-war sections carries the sweetness of a city at peace and in the postwar sections carries the weight of everything that silence is covering. Bảo Ninh writes landscape as emotional terrain — the Jungle of Screaming Souls is not a metaphor but a place where the dead are so present that the living navigate around them. The novel understands Vietnam as a country whose geography has been permanently inscribed by what happened in it, every ridgeline and river crossing carrying the memory of who died there.
The Writer
Bảo Ninh was born Hoàng Ấu Phương in Hanoi in 1952 to an intellectual family — his father was a linguist and scholar. He was drafted in 1969 at seventeen into the Glorious 27th Youth Brigade, served through the war's final six years, and was one of ten survivors from five hundred. After demobilisation he studied at the Nguyễn Du Writing School in Hanoi, the state-run institution that trained most of Vietnam's officially sanctioned writers, and published The Sorrow of War in 1990. He has written almost nothing of comparable scale since — a pattern that the novel itself anticipates, since Kien's inability to finish his manuscript is one of its central subjects.
Vietnamese literature before Bảo Ninh was shaped by two forces: the classical tradition of poetry in Chinese and Nôm script, and the socialist realist fiction mandated by the state after 1954. Writers like Nguyễn Minh Châu had begun pushing against socialist realism's constraints in the 1980s as part of the Đổi Mới (Renovation) literary opening, but Bảo Ninh went further than anyone before him. His novel's precedents are not Vietnamese but European and American — Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, Heller's Catch-22, the fractured modernism of war writing that treats form as a symptom of damage.
Choosing The Sorrow of War is choosing the moment Vietnamese fiction broke free of the state's narrative and spoke in a voice the world could recognise as individually human — not exemplary, not heroic, simply wounded and honest.
The Reckoning
The novel was published in 1990, fifteen years after the fall of Saigon and five years into Đổi Mới, the Communist Party's programme of economic liberalisation that also permitted, briefly and cautiously, a loosening of cultural controls. The official war literature of the previous decades had been relentlessly triumphal — stories of collective heroism, of the people's army defeating the imperialist aggressor, of sacrifice redeemed by victory. Individual suffering, when it appeared, was folded into the larger narrative of national liberation. The cost was acknowledged; the meaning was not negotiable.
Bảo Ninh's novel rejected that settlement. Kien is a veteran who fought on the winning side, and the novel makes clear that winning does not feel like winning to the people who survived. The Jungle of Screaming Souls is not a place where victory was achieved; it is a place where five hundred young men went in and ten came out. The war's political justification — the reunification of Vietnam, the defeat of American imperialism — is never directly challenged, but it is rendered irrelevant by the weight of what the novel describes. No political outcome, the book quietly insists, is adequate to what these people went through.
The Writers' Association awarded the novel its prize in 1991 and then watched as the state grew uncomfortable with what it had honoured. The book was pulled from circulation for several years before being allowed back into print — a trajectory that confirmed its power more eloquently than any prize could.
The Reading
The novel opens with Kien working on a graves registration team in the Jungle of Screaming Souls — a fictional name for the Central Highlands of Vietnam, a place of dense jungle and extreme violence during the war. He and his team are recovering the remains of soldiers from both sides, and the forest itself is described as haunted — inhabited by the spirits of the dead who died there in such numbers that the jungle has been permanently altered. This is not metaphor but observed experience: the soldiers who fought in these places reported hearing voices, experiencing visions, feeling the presence of the dead.
The graves registration work is the novel's temporal anchor: it takes place in the immediate post-war period, and from it Kien's memory begins to move backward and forward simultaneously. The non-linear structure — which Palmos's translation preserves — is not merely experimental; it is the accurate representation of how this material exists in Kien's consciousness. The war does not have a beginning and an end for him; it has a permanent presence, reactivated by smell, by landscape, by the particular quality of jungle light.
Phuong is the central figure of Kien's pre-war and wartime memories — his first love, a girl from his Hanoi neighborhood with whom he grew up and to whom he was deeply attached. Their relationship, which was moving toward something settled and domestic before the war separated them, is the emotional core around which the war's destruction is organized. Phuong's fate during the war — the specific violence that she experienced, which is disclosed gradually and incompletely — is one of the novel's most devastating sequences, handled with a restraint that makes it more disturbing than explicit description would.
The scenes of combat are among the most honest in any war literature. Bảo Ninh is not interested in heroism in the conventional military sense — courage, unit cohesion, the successful execution of tactical objectives — but in what combat feels like from the inside: the terror, the confusion, the specific sounds and smells, the way time distorts under fire, the way the deaths of companions are experienced in the moment and processed over the subsequent years. His soldiers are not propaganda figures; they are frightened young men who kill and are killed in a jungle thousands of kilometres from Hanoi, for reasons they were told they understood and which, in the actual experience of combat, become impossible to hold onto.
The central combat sequence — a fictionalised composite of the battles of the Central Highlands, drawn from Bảo Ninh's own service in the 27th Brigade after 1969 — reconstructs an engagement in which Kien's unit is nearly annihilated. He survives through a combination of luck and the specific instincts of someone who has been at war long enough to have developed a combat sense that functions below rational thought. The survivors emerge into a landscape of extraordinary destruction — the jungle burned back by napalm, the dead scattered across hectares of broken terrain — and the passage from fighting to surviving is described with the numbness that is its actual character.
The relationship between Kien and his fellow soldiers is rendered with affection and specificity. These are people who have been through extreme experiences together, who have developed the particular intimacy of shared survival, and who are also individuals with their own histories and temperaments. Several die, and the deaths are specific rather than general: this man, with this particular way of talking and this particular skill, is gone. Bảo Ninh resists the sentimentalisation that would turn these deaths into nobility; they are simply losses, each one irreplaceable.
The Hanoi of Kien's childhood — before the American bombing, before the war transformed the city — is rendered with the melancholy of someone looking back at a world that no longer exists. The particular Hanoi of the early 1960s, with its French colonial architecture and its tree-lined boulevards and its specific social world, was damaged by the bombing and further altered by the postwar period's material difficulties. For Kien, as for many Vietnamese of his generation, the city of childhood and the city of the present tense are not entirely the same city.
The novel's metafictional dimension — Kien is writing a novel about the war, and the novel we are reading is in some sense the novel he is writing, or the draft of it — allows Bảo Ninh to meditate directly on what literature can and cannot do with this material. Kien writes and rewrites. He burns drafts. He reconstructs what he has burned from memory. The novel is about the impossibility of writing this novel and also, manifestly, its achievement — the two things coexist in the text without resolution.
The postwar Hanoi that Kien inhabits is a city of material scarcity and political constraint. The North Vietnamese state that won the war was a communist state, and its cultural policies were those of socialist realism: literature should serve the revolution, should depict the heroism of the Vietnamese people, should not dwell on suffering in ways that might complicate the narrative of victory. Kien's novel does all the things that socialist realism forbids. It is a monument to sorrow rather than triumph. This is partly why its publication was both celebrated and suppressed.
The novel ends not with resolution but with continuation: Kien alive in postwar Hanoi, the draft of the novel scattered across his room, Phuong lost, the dead of the war still present in the landscape of the Jungle of Screaming Souls. The sorrow of the title is not resolved by the end of the war; it is released by the end of the war from the container of ongoing emergency and allowed to be simply what it is — grief for everything that was lost, which is vast and specific and finally, in this novel, given a name.
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Frank Palmos's translation, revised in consultation with Bảo Ninh, is the only English edition and has been the standard text since its publication. The Riverhead/Vintage paperback is widely available and carries the full force of the original's fractured, lyrical prose.
Translated by Frank Palmos. The standard English edition.
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