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Hanoi at Midnight
Stories
Bao Ninh (Author), Quan Manh Ha (Translated by), Cab Tran (Translated by)
9781682832028
Paperback / softback, published 13 February 2024
216 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.2 cm, 0.167 kg
“In this 2023 collection, the twelve stories Bao Ninh selects (most newly published in English with two stories re-translated at his request) evoke both deep sorrow and timeless longing. [The] graceful translation brings alive these universal stories that probe the deep sorrow of war and its aftermath, even as they touch our hearts with longing and hope. Ha Noi at Midnight is a collection of powerful stories that seeks to take a stand against war by writing about peace—about reconciliation and the human journey toward redemption. Read [this book]. In the face of unending sorrow, these stories retain the power to work miracles.” —Thomas G. Bowie Jr., War, Literature & the Arts: An International Journal of the Humanities 35 (2023)
Breaking a thirty-year silence, Bảo Ninh has permitted at last the publication of a new work in English. Ninh is perhaps Vietnam's foremost chronicler of the war, which he joined at age 17. Bringing to life the full range of his inventive and poetic language, Quan Manh Ha and Cab Tran are granting to English readers Bảo Ninh's first book-length work since The Sorrow of War, which catapulted him to fame and which was banned in Vietnam until 2006. In Hà Nội at Midnight, ten stories are appearing in the West for the first time.
Juxtaposed with tranquility and geniality are abandoned landscapes and defoliated forests. Polluted rivers and streams, the war-torn sky, pungent air filled with the stench of decomposing human corpses, and the deafening roar of helicopters and bombers hovering in the gloom dominate the settings of Bảo Ninh's stories. Intertwined with these horrific images are human tears shed during farewell ceremonies, when recruits are separated from their loved ones, when parents live in anxiety and hope while their children are fighting in remote regions, and when soldiers bury their comrades and burden themselves with the fallen's unfulfilled wishes. Hà Nội at Midnight delineates the complex outpourings of war and the way it remakes human relationships.