The Sorrow of War
by Bảo Ninh
Vietnam won the war. Here is what winning cost.
For you if
you want to understand the Vietnam War through a North Vietnamese veteran who won and couldn't stop grieving
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Kien is a North Vietnamese veteran trying to write a novel about the war. He survived the Jungle of Screaming Souls — a place where so many died that the living could hear them. Bảo Ninh writes about the war from the side that won and lost everything anyway — the friends who died, the love that didn't survive, the landscape permanently altered by napalm and memory. Published in Vietnam in 1990 and immediately controversial because it refused the official narrative of heroic sacrifice. The most honest Vietnamese dispatch about what the war actually cost the people who won it.
Where This Book Lives
- Setting
- Vietnam • Southeast Asia
- Voice
- Written by a Vietnamese author
- Topics
- vietnam war
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