Bao Ninh – författare

Based on the true experiences of Bao Ninh and banned by the communist party, The Sorrow of War is revered as the ‘All Quiet on the Western Front for our era’.Kien’s job is to search the Jungle of Screaming Souls for corpses. He knows the area well – this was where, in the dry season of 1969, his battalion was obliterated by American napalm and helicopter gunfire. Kien was one of only ten survivors. This book is his attempt to understand the eleven years of his life he gave to a senseless war.'A book about writing, about lost youth, it is also a beautiful agonising love story... a magnificent achievement' IndependentTRANSLATED BY FRANK PALMOS AND PHAN THANH HAOThis series of war novels from Vintage Classics presents eight powerful stories about the horror and waste of war - each a passionate plea to prevent its repetition.

Kien searches the Jungle of Screaming Souls to recover the dead, haunted by the day in 1969 when napalm destroyed his battalion.He knows the area well – this was where, in the dry season of 1969, his battalion was obliterated by American napalm and helicopter gunfire. Kien was one of only ten survivors. This book is his attempt to understand the eleven years of his life he gave to the Vietnam War.Drawing on Bao Ninh’s own service in the North Vietnamese army, The Sorrow of War reveals the lasting psychological cost of survival.

Of the twelve short stories appearing in Hà Nội at Midnight, ten are appearing in English for the first time. Bringing to life the full range of Bảo Ninh's inventive and poetic language, Quan Manh Ha and Cab Tran are granting to English readers Bảo Ninh's first book-length work since The Sorrow of War.Hà Nội and Midnight delineates the complex outpourings of war and the way it remakes our relation to each other.Bảo Ninh's stories accentuate the gamut of human emotions: nostalgia, anguish, desolation, melancholy, poignancy, and hope. His stories wistfully render pre-war Hà Nội, its peaceful alleys and streets, its courteous residents, and the cozy atmosphere when family members, neighbors, and friends gather around a fire or converse in a coffee shop, as in "Hà Nội at Midnight" and in "Reminiscences."Juxtaposed with this tranquility and geniality are the abandoned areas and defoliated forests occasioned by American bombardment and the American use of Agent Orange, as in "An Unnamed Star" and "A Farewell to a Soldier's Life." Images of polluted rivers and streams, the war-torn sky, the pungent air filled with the stench of decomposing human corpses, and the deafening roar of helicopters and bombers hovering in the gloomy sky dominate the settings of Bảo Ninh's stories.Intertwined with these horrific images are human tears shed during farewell ceremonies, when recruits are separated from their loved ones, when parents live in anxiety and hope at home while their children are fighting in a war in remote regions, and when soldiers bury their comrades and burden themselves with their fallen comrades' unfulfilled wishes.