Take a photo of a barcode or cover
3.85 AVERAGE
3.85 AVERAGE
dark
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
dark
emotional
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
No
challenging
dark
emotional
sad
tense
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
I should give this 4 stars, because it is a horribly good book. But it was so hard to enjoy reading it, and I came out of it full of grief, not wanting to dwell. Am I glad I read it? Yes. Will I ever read it again? No.
challenging
emotional
reflective
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
A very difficult read. It doesn't focus on the horrors of war (although this does feature), instead it details the inescapable nature of how war forever changes generations of people, and a country.
I can tell that something was lost in translation. I can tell that English was not the first language this story was told in. I can hear a different novel behind this one that is even more beautiful. Probably not going to learn Vietnamese to read the original, but I wish I spoke it.
The translation is clunky at times, you know that the translator is doing his best to make the English match the native tongue, but is failing.
All that said, the book is fine. It hops around from place to place in time, from character to character. It is painful at times, and focused entirely on the war from the perspective of North Vietnamese regulars and irregulars (NVA and Viet Cong). It is the story of a country under siege.
Again, an English reader will be able to see the much more beautiful and painful story behind the adequate, but not amazing, English translation.
The translation is clunky at times, you know that the translator is doing his best to make the English match the native tongue, but is failing.
All that said, the book is fine. It hops around from place to place in time, from character to character. It is painful at times, and focused entirely on the war from the perspective of North Vietnamese regulars and irregulars (NVA and Viet Cong). It is the story of a country under siege.
Again, an English reader will be able to see the much more beautiful and painful story behind the adequate, but not amazing, English translation.
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
Sometimes it happens that a writer bleeds words on paper, mostly while talking about his life, so his novel becomes a written trace of his existence, emotions, and what he went through. Bao Ninh is one such writer, a man who, in his debut and only novel "The Sorrow of War", wove himself into the sentences of his novel and thus gave us a powerful novel for generations to come.
During the Vietnam War, he served in the 27th Vietnam War. A youth brigade in the ranks of North Vietnam. Of the 500 young men and women in that unit, 10 of them survived. Six of them committed suicide in the 10 years since the war. Ninh told the story of that generation of losers on the winning side of the Vietnam War, which led to his novel being banned by the Communist Party for a long time, and he was under surveillance.
Filled with melancholy from the first to the last letter, "The Sorrow of War" is a novel about war, what is left behind, human destinies, tragic love, and the struggle with demons within those who survive. The only way to get rid of them is to write and in what beautiful and sorrowful way Ninh does it. They called "The Sorrow of War" "All Quiet on the Western Front" for new generations, which tells a lot about the strength of the novel and the impression it leaves, and after reading it, you will not be able to get rid of the bitterness in your mouth and the lump in your throat for a long time, both because of the sadness that is felt, and because of the scenes that Ninh writes.
However, Ninh seems to be ashamed of himself, of what he did, who he was, and what he turned into, or maybe it was easier for him to write that way, so he splits his personality and writes the novel in the third person. His alter ego becomes Kien, a young man whose story begins a few years after the war, when, as a member of a unit for collecting the dead and searching for the missing, he finds himself again in the Jungle of Screaming Souls, the place where his brigade left bones. From that moment on, as he lies on a hammock in the back of a Russian truck filled with remains, haunted by memories, Kien tells his story in an extremely non-linear way, as if his train of thought was interrupted and then reassembled, he walks from period to period, bringing us scenes from life, and tells the story of Kien, a young man at the age of 17 who goes to war full of enthusiasm and ideals. And he returns as an old man in the body of a 27-year-old, who is burdened with what he has been through.
Years go by, Kien is now in her forties, but the sorrow does not subside. It is a part of his being, it accompanies him, as well as the spirits of his comrades-in-arms, memories of war and love, which he has never overcome. He is a damaged man, who writes to survive, not to be published. He writes at night, gets drunk, and is only accompanied by a mute girl who preserves his manuscript, as it is, scattered and disjointed, only to have Ninh appear at the end of the novel, as a first-person narrator, and takes over the manuscript and publishes it in that scattered form.
The novel has no chapters, but a series of passages, each as if taken out of Ninh's memory, about individual struggles, women he met, friends he lost, things he saw, and each of them carries a blow that takes the breath out of our lungs. I will single out the scene in which the mail arrives in the unit, the only letter they receive is for a soldier from his mother who tells him about her life, prays for him, and rejoices in his letter because he is the only member of her family who is left after she lost her second son. The old woman does not know that her son deserted a few days before, intending to return to her, but they found him dead in the jungle. Told in such a way, fragmented and disjointed, it can be described as a PTSD train of thought.
For this novel, Ninh was awarded the International Prize for Fiction in 1994, which is now the Man Booker International Prize, and found its way to the West thanks to a rough translation into English by a friend of his, who brought the manuscript to the editor's desk. Ninh wrote a second novel, called "Steppe", but did not publish it for fear of repercussions, and in an interview, he said "that in Vietnam it is not the right time to publish a novel".
During the Vietnam War, he served in the 27th Vietnam War. A youth brigade in the ranks of North Vietnam. Of the 500 young men and women in that unit, 10 of them survived. Six of them committed suicide in the 10 years since the war. Ninh told the story of that generation of losers on the winning side of the Vietnam War, which led to his novel being banned by the Communist Party for a long time, and he was under surveillance.
Filled with melancholy from the first to the last letter, "The Sorrow of War" is a novel about war, what is left behind, human destinies, tragic love, and the struggle with demons within those who survive. The only way to get rid of them is to write and in what beautiful and sorrowful way Ninh does it. They called "The Sorrow of War" "All Quiet on the Western Front" for new generations, which tells a lot about the strength of the novel and the impression it leaves, and after reading it, you will not be able to get rid of the bitterness in your mouth and the lump in your throat for a long time, both because of the sadness that is felt, and because of the scenes that Ninh writes.
However, Ninh seems to be ashamed of himself, of what he did, who he was, and what he turned into, or maybe it was easier for him to write that way, so he splits his personality and writes the novel in the third person. His alter ego becomes Kien, a young man whose story begins a few years after the war, when, as a member of a unit for collecting the dead and searching for the missing, he finds himself again in the Jungle of Screaming Souls, the place where his brigade left bones. From that moment on, as he lies on a hammock in the back of a Russian truck filled with remains, haunted by memories, Kien tells his story in an extremely non-linear way, as if his train of thought was interrupted and then reassembled, he walks from period to period, bringing us scenes from life, and tells the story of Kien, a young man at the age of 17 who goes to war full of enthusiasm and ideals. And he returns as an old man in the body of a 27-year-old, who is burdened with what he has been through.
Years go by, Kien is now in her forties, but the sorrow does not subside. It is a part of his being, it accompanies him, as well as the spirits of his comrades-in-arms, memories of war and love, which he has never overcome. He is a damaged man, who writes to survive, not to be published. He writes at night, gets drunk, and is only accompanied by a mute girl who preserves his manuscript, as it is, scattered and disjointed, only to have Ninh appear at the end of the novel, as a first-person narrator, and takes over the manuscript and publishes it in that scattered form.
The novel has no chapters, but a series of passages, each as if taken out of Ninh's memory, about individual struggles, women he met, friends he lost, things he saw, and each of them carries a blow that takes the breath out of our lungs. I will single out the scene in which the mail arrives in the unit, the only letter they receive is for a soldier from his mother who tells him about her life, prays for him, and rejoices in his letter because he is the only member of her family who is left after she lost her second son. The old woman does not know that her son deserted a few days before, intending to return to her, but they found him dead in the jungle. Told in such a way, fragmented and disjointed, it can be described as a PTSD train of thought.
For this novel, Ninh was awarded the International Prize for Fiction in 1994, which is now the Man Booker International Prize, and found its way to the West thanks to a rough translation into English by a friend of his, who brought the manuscript to the editor's desk. Ninh wrote a second novel, called "Steppe", but did not publish it for fear of repercussions, and in an interview, he said "that in Vietnam it is not the right time to publish a novel".