The dwarf camp of the week

Bao Ninh is a Vietnamese writer who fought in the Northern Army during the American War. His novel The Sadness of War, published in 1990, made him world famous, but he also wrote and continues to write short stories. His works are not black-and-white, propaganda-flavored partisan stories, nor are they only about war. Recurring themes are unfulfilled love and reconciliation with old enemies. In his short stories, war appears as a fateful, uncontrollable factor beyond human power, rather than as a struggle fought for some noble goal. His writings have a lyrical tone, dream and reality, past and present, the world of the living and the dead are mixed in them. We can discover fairy-tale and mythological motifs, transplanted into a modern environment: In the secrets of the waves, the narrator loses his own newborn son in the flood, but saves the infant of an unknown drowning, as if the spirit of the water replaces the children; the main character of Jel on the side of the boat wanders through the labyrinth of Hanoi streets and gets lost, lacking a thread to guide him back; And the storyteller of the camp of the seven dwarfs waits for his Snow White to come home in vain. Reconciliation is the central theme of the short story Jobbos. The former guerrilla commander returns to his village, where the majority supported the other side and relatives became mortal enemies during the war. The characters of Levél '73 are the northern and southern soldiers fighting a bloody battle with each other, who become friends during the truce at the beginning of the short year. Enough of the old stories! in the novella, the former enemies understand each other better than the generation that grew up after the war understands them. In The Clouds, an old woman lights incense for her fallen son, about whom it is not clear on which side he fought - the pain of both sides is the same. In Before the Attack, a northern gun commander sacrifices himself for a southern civilian. The age of motorcycles is a snapshot of the modernizing, consumer-oriented world, and in A Marseillaise, nostalgia for the old, pre-war times appears. Thanks to the many American novels, memoirs and, of course, films, we can already know the history of the American-Vietnam war well from an American point of view. This anthology is suitable for taking a look at it from a North Vietnamese point of view.