Mapped
The Quiet American
Graham Greene
Greene's Saigon is the French colonial capital in its last years, seen through the weary British correspondent Fowler and the earnest young American Pyle. The map holds the short, dense spine of the old centre: the terrace of the Continental, the shopfronts of the rue Catinat, the square by the opera house where a bomb goes off at mid-morning, and the Majestic on the river where the war and the city meet the water. It brings Vietnam and 1950s Saigon into the atlas.
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The Sorrow of War
Bảo Ninh
A North Vietnamese veteran, Kien, comes home to Hanoi after the war and tries to write it down, his memory looping between the ruined city of his youth and the jungle where his battalion was destroyed. Hanoi is the fixed present: the apartment where he writes through the night, the lakes and streets he shared with his first love Phương, and the railway station from which the troop trains went south. The war itself is set far off, in the Central Highlands the soldiers called the Jungle of Screaming Souls.
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