Bao Ninh

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Bảo Ninh (born on October 18, 1952) is a Vietnamese novelist and short story writer.

His real name is Hoàng Ấu Phương and he was born in the Nghe An province (his ancestors were from Quang Binh province), Vietnam. During the Vietnam War he served with the Glorious 27th Youth Brigade. Of the five hundred who went to war with the brigade in 1969, he is one of ten who survived.

A successful short story writer focusing primarily on stories about the war, Bao Ninh shot into the limelight with his debut novel, Thân phận của tình yêu, (The destiny of Love) published 1991 in Hanoi. An English translation by Frank Palmos and Phan Thanh Hao was published in 1994, with the title "The Sorrow of War", which became a widely acclaimed novel, with some critics placing the work among the most moving war novels of all time.

Recent Vietnamese edition with the new title Nỗi buồn chiến tranh (sorrow of war)

Sorrow of War is a nonlinear narrative by Kien, a North Vietnamese soldier during the Vietnam War, chronicling his loss of innocence, his love, and his anguish (sorrow) at the memories of war. The novel weaves back and forth between tales of unfulfilled love and the narrative of war, which fails to fulfill its own objectives. The tale is hauntingly told, verging on poetry:

The sorrow of war inside a soldier's heart was in a strange way similar to the sorrow of love. It was a kind of nostalgia, like the immense sadness of a world at dusk.

At one level, the novel can be said to be about effects of war on people, and especially how it defeats the human capacity for love:

It was hard to remember a time when his whole personality and character had been intact, a time before the cruelty and the destruction of war had warped his soul. A time when he had been deeply in love, passionate, aching with desire, hilariously frivolous and light-hearted, or quickly depressed by love and suffering. Or blushing in embarrassment. When he, too, was worthy of being a lover and in love...

But war was a world with no home, no roof, no comforts. A miserable journey, of endless drifting. War was a world without real men, without real women, without feeling.

At another level, it is about the horrors, and the eventual futility of war. The novel is openly critical of communist propaganda, e.g., the slogans that ban young people from enjoying sex, love, and marriage - these are the "Three Don'ts" in the pre-war communist heterodoxy. At another point, Kien sympathizes with the owner of a coffee plantation in the South, who says he does not care for the government, neither north nor south, the main aim is that people should be happy. There is no joy even in the eventual victory, only grim fatigue among the heaped up corpses at Saigon airport after the American withdrawal.

Possibly due to these nuances, the novel was briefly banned after its release in 1991. However, with the winds of liberalization sweeping Vietnam in the 1990s, the immensely popular book could not be suppressed.

The book has also gained wide readership in the West where it is one of the few books to present the story from the other side. Admirably, Bao Ninh does this without blaming the other side in any way. Another work in this vein is Novel without a Name by Duong Thu Huong.

In 2005, it was republished in Vietnam under its original name, The Destiny of Love (Thân phận của tình yêu); another edition in 2006 adopted the Vietnamese version of the English title.

Bao Ninh has written a second novel, "Steppe" that he is reluctant to publish^[1], possibly because he feels it is not as natural as his earlier work.

A short story by Bao Ninh, "A Marker on the Side of the Boat" (Khắc dấu mạn thuyền), translated by Linh Dinh, is included in the anthology Night, Again.