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 Nghệ An province (his ancestors were from Quảng Bình province), Vietnam. During the Vietnam War, he served in 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, Bảo 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. Counterfeits of the English language edition then became widely available in Vietnam for the tourist trade.[1]
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 and sadness) at the memories of war, a short summary of the novel follows:
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:
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:
On 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 South where it is one of the few books to present the story from the other side of the Civil War. Admirably, Bảo 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 Understanding of Love (Thân phận của tình yêu); another edition in 2006 adopted the Vietnamese version of the English title (Nỗi buồn chiến tranh).
Bảo Ninh has written a second novel, Steppe, that he is reluctant to publish,[2] possibly because he feels it is not as natural as his earlier work.
A short story by Bảo Ninh, "A Marker on the Side of the Boat" (Khắc dấu mạn thuyền), translated by Linh Dinh, is included in the anthology Night, Again.