Why Vietnam’s best-known author has stayed silent
Bao Ninh, author of acclaimed novel The Sorrow of War, speaks about why he’s never published another novel in an interview with Guardian Unlimited:
‘I stopped myself. I kept holding myself back,’ Ninh told The Observer in a rare interview at his home in a section of central Hanoi favoured by middle-ranking officials. ‘I compared everything I wrote to everything I wrote in the past, and it’s not natural like it was before.’
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He is less forthright about his decision to forgo publishing his next novel, claiming that he has written almost constantly since 1991 as the editor of a literary weekly in Hanoi. Writing novels is slow work, he claims, and his new work has been a struggle. ‘I became more famous, so people know about me and other writers respect me,’ he says. ‘But it also affected me badly because I become self-conscious.’
