Spotlight customer reviews: Customer Rating: Summary: First novel intrigues, then falls into disarrayComment: The Sorrow of War is Ninh's first novel, and it remains at the grade of an author still grappling with technique and style. This novel about the Vietnam War is a halting creation, a confused jumble of narratives which fail to adhere. There are several disjointed themes in the novel: Kien the soldier at war, Kien the depressed post-war author, and Kien the lover. These strands are awkwardly woven together, and further confused by constant chronological switching.
Customer Rating: Summary: The "All Quiet on the Western Front" of the Vietnam WarComment: Like several other reviewers, I bought a cheap ripoff copy of this book from a street peddler (in my case a one-legged woman obviously of an age to have been a victim of the war herself) in Saigon last week. I originally bought it as a charity contribution to her, but when I started reading it on the plane coming home, I literally couldn't sleep until I finished it. It's an astonishingly honest and brutal depiction of the tragedy of a North Vietnam soldier desensitized to his own humanity after ten years at war.
Customer Rating: Summary: Sorrow indeed!Comment: Bao Ninh's book is a difficult read, due in part to the translation, I suspect. Other reviewers have also made this observation. The book offers a rare look at the war from the view of an NVA soldier. Ninh writes in a highly unusual style -- difficult to understand without a good deal of thought. Duong Tu Huong, another well-known Vietnamese writer of Ninh's generation, is more accessible for Western readers in my judgment. The veteran who narrates this book is a tortured soul, maybe not entirely sane. Unlike most Vietnamese, he is cut off from a living community. What he has are his memories and the ghosts of his friends. He is memorable, disturbing, but not easy to know.Customer Rating: Summary: A human being's duty on this earth is to live, not to killComment: In his novel in a novel Bao Ninh gives us a rare insight into the war scene of those who beat the Americans and their allies in Vietnam. His sometimes brutally violent and emotional picture shows that war everywhere is a `Jungle of Screaming Souls', causing psychological ruin and familial and social destruction. For the rest of their lives, it will leave deep inextinguishable scars in those who were lucky to survive
Customer Rating: Summary: A Must Read!Comment: If you want to understand what it was like to fight the war from the other side, The Sorrow of War is a must read. The author, Bao Ninh, a North Vietnamese regular, fought for ten years, not 365 days. This book puts a face on those nameless NVA soldiers who died in what the Vietnamese call "The American War." Bao Ninh is the Tim O'Brien of Vietnam and the two novels - The Sorrow of War and The Things They Carried - are all you need to understand the life of the grunt and the effects of war on the soldiers of both sides.
