Bao Ninh is a Vietnamese writer born on October 18, 1952, in Hanoi. He served as a soldier in the Glorious 27th Youth Brigade during the Vietnam War, and he came back home as one of only ten survivors in his unit of five hundred. The war had an immense impact on Ninh’s life, and the only possible way he could cope with the terror was to write.
The initial title of Ninh’s debut novel was Thân phận của tình yêu (The Destiny of Love) which tells the story of a young man named Kien, a veteran whose job is to dispose of leftover bodies after the Vietnam War. As he continues to work, Kien endures flashbacks to the horror of battle as well as the abuse he suffered in his childhood. Ninh’s book is a brutal, harrowing story that addresses the mental repercussions of war and strongly reflects his personal experiences as a soldier.
Thân phận của tình yêu first circulated Hanoi in a roneo form and became popular in Vietnam. Phan Thanh Ho translated it into English, which led the Communist Party in Vietnam to ban the novel. The English-language manuscript was most likely smuggled out and, now titled The Sorrow of War, was published in 1994 to great acclaim. It was a bestseller in the West and still remained popular in Vietnam in the form of pirated/contraband copies; the ban was lifted in 2006.
Upon its publication in English, The Sorrow of War garnered positive reviews from audiences and critics alike for its provocative portrayal of a war that took the lives of over one million people. Michael Fathers of The Independent praises Ninh for the multilayered nature of the story and how it explores the impact of the war on every facet of the protagonist. He states that “on one level it is a love story. On another it is about a writer, a burnt-out case, finding his way. It is also about camaraderie and lost innocence and class conflict. It moves backwards and forwards in time, and in and out of despair, dragging you down as the hero-loner leads you through his private hell in the highlands of central Vietnam or pulling you up when his spirits rise.”
The masterful storytelling throughout The Sorrow of War ultimately led to its winning the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. Of the novel, writer Viet Thanh Ngyuen writes, “Linear, coherent storytelling in regards to the war and the revolution are the features of government-sanctioned storytelling, in films, novels, and especially historical museums. This kind of storytelling pins all the blame on enemy outsiders and internal traitors, and paints the soldiers, guerrillas, and revolutionaries as optimistic, noble patriots. Bao Ninh’s novel tells a radically different story about how these young patriots were utterly destroyed by the war. That much is coherent. But when one is utterly destroyed, can one be coherent? That core trauma is ultimately revealed by the end, and we finally understand why the novel could not be narrated in a linear fashion. This is a terrific move by a novelist who understands, implicitly or explicitly, how trauma works.”
