The Sorrow of War

by Bao Ninh

First published 1990

Amazon

4.3(1,335)

Years after the fighting, Kiên, a North Vietnamese veteran, returns with a remains-recovery team to the Jungle of Screaming Souls, where his battalion was destroyed in 1969. The work releases fragmented memories of his service: marches through the Central Highlands, sudden attacks, dead comrades and the relentless violence that carried him from adolescence into a war from which almost no one in his unit returned. His memories also circle around Phương, his childhood love, whose relationship with Kiên is altered beyond repair by the years of conflict.

Back in post-war Hanoi, Kiên tries to turn memory into a manuscript, but the past refuses chronological order. Battle scenes, love, survivor guilt and moments of beauty surface in broken sequences as he confronts both the men he lost and the person he became. Told from the perspective of a North Vietnamese soldier, The Sorrow of War is an anti-heroic war novel about trauma, memory, love and the difficulty of surviving peace.