Bảo Ninh’s The Sorrow of War is a destabilizing experience and Ninh knows exactly what he’s doing.
The Sorrow of War is a novel and maybe-memoir that focuses on Kien, a young man bound up in the Vietnam war. The novel begins, though, in 1976, where Kien works in a troop trying to find the bodies of MIA soldiers from the war. What’s most striking is that the novel opens with such rich, beautiful imagery: it’s at a complete disconnect from the content of the story. The death and darkness is, by contrast, overshadowed by lush images of Vietnam.
There’s a note I should have written down, but I failed to be a good reader. Essentially, after about thirty pages Ninh narrates how Kien is writing a novel that is characterized (read this in italics) exactly as what you’ve just read. He describes the violence and death as being at a disconnect from the imagery as I just have. It’s a profoundly self-reflective moment where Ninh shows that he knows exactly what he’s up to as a writer.
What makes the moment so incredible, though, is that the metafictional aspect of the book serves the thematic interests of The Sorrow of War beautifully, giving the book a cohesive quality beyond its disorderly approach. When I consider the wave of metafictional writing that took hold in the postmodern period, a lot of it seems to be commentary on truth and writing itself, and often ends there. At its worst, metafiction is a wink and a nudge to how clever the author is.
There are, of course, exceptions that are truly stunning, and with that in mind I’d like to draw an unlikely comparison. The work of Samuel Beckett often has a metafictional quality where the storytelling is so disrupted yet speaks beautifully to subjecthood. In a posthumanist lens, the narration of Beckett’s works points to the inconsistencies, the incompleteness, and the potentialities for human existence. Here, Ninh does something similar that is well worth a closer inspection.
The Sorrow of War, in the first place, is a blur of memoir and novel. One would assume that Ninh is the main character, yet the truthfulness and subjecthood of the central figure is immediately questionable because the character’s name is Kien. Moreover, Kien is (presumably) writing a novel about his experiences, and once again the truth of his experience is called into question. It is consistently referred to as a novel rather than a memoir, which implies a layer of fiction, and then the narration of Ninh’s book is repeatedly, repeatedly interrupted to comment on Kien’s novel. So, the book you’re reading is commenting on the book Kien is writing, which comments on the book you’re reading. It has a circularity which challenges your own sense of stability, similar to the way Kien’s characters experience the Vietnam war.
Ninh’s book reads as a series of vaguely connected episodes. There will be stories of a troop playing cards and then being unceremoniously killed. There are stories of amorous affairs that dissipate into a mist of contradictions. The story works, in some ways, backwards, and the climax of the story is Kien being enlisted in the war. The novel explores the disruptions to the experience of time and forces the reader into that experience by playing scenes out of order and making it impossible for scenes to exist simultaneously.
Related to the disruption of subjecthood and the nonlinearity of the story, Kien recounts his interactions with Phuong, a young love. Partway through the novel, following the return from war, it appears that Kien and Phuong are neighbours. It suggests that they love one another, and yet Phuong appears to be ‘unworthy’ of him (it’s implied she’s a sex worker) and then she seemingly transforms into a different woman, a mute woman. Meanwhile, Kien seems to be disassociated from his identity and becomes ‘the author.’ There’s a surreal quality that reflects what I assume is post-traumatic stress disorder and lack of cohesion in memory. When Kien finishes writing his book, he presents it to the mute woman. She notes that it’s all out of order and he himself acknowledges that “the novel was the ash from this exorcism of devils” (109).
As I’ve mentioned, the novel is largely a commentary on time, as well. Aside from being presented out of logical sequence, there are several moments where characters comment on the way the Vietnam war disrupted time and how they are no longer connected to time as it was. In one scene, Kien narrates: “The future lied to us, long ago in the past. There is no new life, no new era, nor is it hope for a beautiful future that now drives me on, but rather the opposite. The hope is contained in the beautiful pre-war past.” The idea of the future reaching into the past is worth exploring, as is the death and impossibility of the future [c.f. the work of Mark Fisher—the erasure of the future is a motif explored in a different but analogous context]. The idea of hope only existing in the past is also a surprising turn, since hope is nearly by definition a future-reaching sentiment. Elsewhere, Phuong recognizes a similar experience. After some traumatic events (I’ll tell you later, I’m following the out-of-order approach), Phuong tells Kien: “You go your way, I’ll go mine. We had such a beautiful life. You and me, my love for you, your love for me. My mother and your dad, and I would have been your wife, no doubt. That was in the past. Now we have a new future, a new fate. We had no choice in the new circumstances, it was an unlucky coincidence. Now I’m like this, you go your way, I’ll go mine” (212). She comments on the impossibility of their future, but what I find most engaging in the passage is how Ninh uses verb tenses. She begins by referring to the past: “We had such a beautiful life.” She then goes through a series of sentence fragments with no verb tenses before switching to the conditional statement “I would have been your wife.” She places that conditional, though, “in the past.” There’s something about the conditional being relegated to the past that I find so compelling, as if there’s an even greater distance between the potential and the actual. Not only is the future only what could have been, but the future is a possibility withdrawn so far into the past it is doubly impossible.
The shift in time, again, is self-reflexive: “At first I tried to rearrange the manuscript pages into chronological order, to make the manuscript read like the sort of book I was familiar with. But it was useless. There was no chronological order at all. Any page seemed like the first, any page could have been the last. Even if the manuscript had been numbered, even if no pages had been burned, or moth-eaten, or withheld by the author, if by chance they were all there, this novel would still be a work created by turbulent, even manic inspirations [...] The flow of the story continually changed. From beginning to end the novel consisted of blocks of images. A certain cluster of events, then disruptions, some event wiped off the page as if it had fallen into a hole in time” (223).
The novel is rightly described as occurring in blocks. In that respect, it’s sometimes difficult to latch onto and feel invested. Characters will be introduced only to be slaughtered, or characters will shift in a way where suddenly you’re unclear on who is who and where is where.
That said, there were pockets where I felt myself truly compelled and enthralled in the action of the story. One scene that comes to mind is when Kien is leading a troop and looks the other way when they withdraw nightly for amorous trysts, despite it being against the rules. The women disappear and then the troop seeks revenge against the Americans that presumably raped and murdered the women. There’s a scene where the Americans have been ordered to dig their own graves and they plead for their lives. The tension in the moment is so tightly wrought that it’s hard to deny its force.
Even more impeccable is the climax of the novel, which is a longer stretch that is just stunning. The fact that the climax of the novel is actually chronologically one of the earliest events is interesting in its own right: the past has retained its force. Kien has been called to war and we know from what happens ‘later’ (but earlier in the book) that there are harsh punishments against perceived or actual deserters. Phuong and Kien want to have one last night together before going to war and the whole sequence is rife with sorrow. Essentially, there’s an air raid warning so they have to hide, which means Kien misses his train, and they’re panicked that he’ll be imprisoned or killed for not showing up for service. So, the two try to race against time (and the train) in order to get Kien to his destination on time. It has the intensity and the fog of war effect that I loved so much about the climax of Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans. Kien and Phuong end up stealing a bicycle and there’s a carefree childishness bound up with the emotional complexity of leaving for war. They then end up on a train and the train gets bombed, Phuong is raped by a group of Vietnamese men (maybe), and Kien tries to find her after they are separated. The scene flashes forward and backwards by years and more information is revealed that makes the entire scene questionable. The bond between the characters is tragic and beautiful and the scene is so bittersweet; their shared mission to get Kien to war is exhilarating and yet it’s strange for them to race towards an event that you know produces their sorrow and doom and so on. It’s a pretty incredible ending stretch to the story, giving backstory that alters your perception of the events that follow chronologically.
Kien and Phuong are rich characters, but beyond that the characters often read as somewhat flat. I think it’s largely purposeful. In one scene, Kien reflects on his father’s career as an artist, which is interesting in its own right because his style is at a disconnect with the political climate of the time. In his father’s paintings, “human beings wore dismal expressions, their faces were long and drawn, their bodies stretched. The colours were strange, too. The paintings were utterly depressing, the subjects moronic. [...] with no exception they were all done in varying tones of yellow. Yellow. No other colours, just yellow. [...] the characters wandered aimlessly across unreal landscapes, like withered puppets joined to each other like cut-out figures” (121). I’m tempted to read the novel in terms of the artist’s vision. The human beings in the novel are all pretty dismal and could be interchangeable in the same way that the figures in the painting are all done in the same style. Describing the characters “like withered puppets joined to each other like cut-out figures” I think is an equally appropriate descriptor.
The book itself is pretty punishing. It’s full of sorrow. It’s full of death. It’s full of pain. The whole text reads as, basically, one block of text. There are paragraph breaks but there are no chapter breaks or clear delineation between sections. As a result, it feels like relentless blocks of text. It really emulates the sensation of an endless, ongoing war.
Ultimately, The Sorrow of War is a crushing novel / memoir. In many respects it’s compelling, if not actually -pleasurable-. What Ninh does with narrative and seeing his twist on metafictional tropes is surprising and warrants further study. The book subverts expectations around memory, time, and identity in ways that I’ve rarely seen replicated elsewhere. The historical milieu is engaging to me—I’ve been fascinated by the Vietnam war since a high school politics teacher used it as the foundation for our course and I’m often drawn to literature that speaks to that time (I highly recommend em by Kim Thúy). From a story standpoint, some points hit and some points don’t—I’m sure it will be a matter of personal preference what resonates. Because the book makes itself hard to latch onto and because of the dark subject matter, I can’t say it’s the most enjoyable book I’ve read, but it is one that will leave me thinking.
Happy reading!
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