3:AM Magazine, 2024
On a novel by Bao Ninh, The Sorrow of War (translation by Tobias Ryan in 3ammagazine)
This article was published in French in Les Lettres françaises (2019)
“I only met him once. Vietnam had just started to reopen. Knowing of my interest in the literature of their country, friends had taken advantage of my presence to gather a couple of writers. Several generations had come together in a little apartment. He, Bao Ninh, was introduced to me as a the author of a novel whose publication had caused a stir at the end of the eighties, and had been banned since. That afternoon, he said almost nothing. He listened to the others. He stayed quiet in front of the present-day dissidents, those, at least, who had dared to come.
I never suspected that his book would find me much, much later. Nor that he would become one of the veins of my relationship with that country.
It’s a sad work and one of disillusionment, but I recognised a country that was mine, one in which, however, I was not born, to which my family had no connection, and that I was only able to discover through the fortune of friendship. Perhaps it is not a physical place, in fact, but more an interior landscape with less precise frontiers. Because over there another country had opened up for me: one that is to come, that we recognise, and which seems to emerge from a past beyond our own existence.
I often say to myself smiling, I must have been Vietnamese in a past life. And every time that I read The Sorrow of War, I can’t help but believe that might be true. Because even if I tamper down my memories of my travels and superstitious wanderings, even if I feel sorrow mount and measureless grief at the extent of the carnage, even if I let the “pain with prospect” that the novel bares take possession of me, even if a relentless listlessness rises like a mist, I feel myself overcome by a troubling sense of brotherhood…”