The Sorrow of War

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.

Kiên

Kiên's apartment, Hanoi

The present

Back in postwar Hanoi, sleepless and half-mad with memory, Kiên fills notebook after notebook with the war he cannot leave behind. The disordered manuscript he produces is the book itself, its chronology shattered the way his mind is, the peacetime city a thin surface over the jungle underneath.

Framing narrative

explicit The novel's present is Hanoi, where the veteran Kiên writes through the nights in his apartment; sited in the real city that frames the whole book.

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