Review by Choice Review
This novel joins a very small group of works of literature about the Vietnam War: those written from the perspective of the North, the side of the Other. The author's note says Bao Ninh "served with the Glorious 27th Youth Brigade. Of the five hundred who went to war with the Brigade ... he is one of ten who survived." This is the compelling story of Kien, as he negotiates the war and its aftermath, viewing the wreckage of 30 years of brutality on his people, his loves, and himself. The novel's progress repeatedly corkscrews back to April 30, 1975, the day the war officially ended, with the author's insights into the burdens and the hauntings victory brings. Kien says, "Since returning to Hanoi, I've had to live with this parade of horrific memories, day after day, long night after long night. For how many years now?" The novel has the force and realism of Remarque's writing while displaying metafictional characteristics similar to Tim O'Brien's works. Sensitive, dramatic, and revealing, full of poetry, pathos, and a deep sense of tragedy and loss, this war novel will, in this reviewer's opinion, be seen in time as a classic. Highly recommended for all levels. B. Adler; Valdosta State College
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
A novel addition to fiction from the Indochina conflict, this quasi-autobiographical story depicts a North Vietnamese infantryman trying to purge his grisly memories through writing. Sitting in his dingy Hanoi room, drinking day after day away, the central character, Kien, records in no set order his enlistment into the army, the bombing of his troop train, hellish firefights and napalming in the Central Highlands (an area superstitiously dubbed by Kien's comrades the "Jungle of the Screaming Souls"), his escape from an American patrol after the Tet offensive of '68, combat in Saigon's fall in '75, and his memory-piquing work on a postwar MIA detail. Each chunk of experience jostles the other, an intentional echo of the writer's struggle to describe the chaotic, while simultaneously attempting to find his own authorial voice. Thus Bao Ninh's work is half about war. If there is a message, it is that a survivor's reconciliation with savage memory is impossible--perhaps not the most original idea in war novels, but one worth hearing from the ex-enemy. ~--Gilbert Taylor
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Kien, the protagonist of this rambling and sometimes nearly incoherent but emotionally gripping account of the Vietnam war, is a 10-year veteran whose experiences bear a striking similarity to those of the author, a Hanoi writer who fought with the Glorious 27th Youth Brigade. The novel opens just after the war, with Kien working in a unit that recovers soldiers' corpses. Revisiting the sites of battles raises emotional ghosts for him, ``a parade of horrific memories'' that threatens his sanity, and he finds that writing about those years is the only way to purge them. Juxtaposing battle scenes with dreams and childhood remembrances as well as events in Kien's postwar life, the book builds to a climax of brutality. A trip to the front with Kien's childhood sweetheart ends with her noble act of sacrifice, and it becomes clear to the reader that, in Vietnam, purity and innocence exist only to be besmirched. Covering some of the same physical and thematic terrain as Novel Without a Name (see above), The Sorrow of War is often as chaotic in construction as the events it describes. In fact, it is untidy and uncontrolled, like the battlefield it conveys. The point of view slips willy-nilly from the third person to the first, without any clear semblance of organization. The inclusion of a deaf mute who falls for Kien, and acts for a while as a witness to his life, seems gratuitous. The faults of this book are also its strengths, however. Its raggedness aptly evokes the narrator's feverish view of a dangerous and unpredictable world. And its language possesses a ferocity of expression that strikes the reader with all the subtlety of a gut-punch. Polishing this rough jewel would, strangely, make it less precious. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
These two novelists, both of whom fought for North Vietnam, offer American readers a startlingly different perspective on the war. (LJ 1/95) (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A North Vietnamese veteran transforms his nation's conflict into an elegiac ode to doomed youth caught up in wars not of their making. This novel does not view war as a big, defining male adventure, but rather as something that crushes its participants when they are ``young, very pure, and very sincere'' and leaves behind a legacy of ``sublime sorrow, more sublime than happiness and beyond suffering.'' The narrator, Kien, is a veteran turned writer who joined the army fresh out of school. In a narrative that moves back and forth in time, he records not only the horrors of war, but also his unsatisfactory relationships with his father and with Phuong, the young woman he's loved since childhood. An assignment searching for bodies after a big battle begins his story. It reminds him of old comrades killed in action, of friends deserting because they wanted to see their families, and of his doomed love for Phuong, who, raped repeatedly on a train under bombardment, became ``a hardened experienced woman, indifferent to vulnerable emotions.'' He also describes his current difficulties: finding a place to live, money worries, and the memories that continue to assail him as he writes. (``The conflicts continued from the lines on pages into the real life of the author, the fighting refused to die.'') At the end, we learn that this story is an abandoned manuscript being readied for publication by a stranger who understands that Kien wrote, ``not because he had to publish...he had to think on paper.'' As one of 10 surviving members of a Youth Brigade once 500 strong, the author has the appropriate background for writing this novel, but--more importantly--his alchemy transforms the recognizable horrors of an actual war into universal experiences. A war novel in the great tradition of Remarque and Sassoon.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
