The Sorrow of War by Bao Ninh (Riverhead Books)

Although it's commonly accepted that truth is stranger than fiction, passionate readers quickly learn that fiction provides truths that cannot be found in volumes of fact and nowhere is this more obvious than in fiction about war. Military history is usually written with impeccable research and superb scholarship, but to learn what war truly is, it's necessary to turn to All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque, Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead, Landsman by Peter Charles Melman or A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali by Giles Courtemanche. These are all novels that convey what war is for the people within it, the visceral, stinking carnage and terror and waste of combatants and noncombatants alike.

Bookshelves bulge with military histories of the Vietnam War. They are books that contain numbers, statistics, reports, and background information, but they do not contain the war itself. For that, readers need to pick up Bao Ninh's slender and frequently overlooked novel, The Sorrow of War.

This is a book with emotional and literary weight that is belied by its slightly more than two hundred and fifty pages. Even the most voracious bibliovore will discover that reading it takes time. Entering a war is not easy and staying within it is at times unbearable, but while Bao Ninh quickly makes that apparent, his literary skill keeps his readers enmeshed in the horror that he depicts so well.

Kien is a survivor, one of the few soldiers from his battalion who has lived to see American troops leave his country in defeat. After fighting for the entire ten years that the United States brought its power to bear against Vietnam, he is ready to return to Hanoi and live the life he has dreamed of for the past decade. The girl he loves is waiting for him, he has a home to return to, the war has left him neither crippled nor mutilated. He, along with other returning soldiers, have "wildly passionate ideas of how they would launch into their new civilian peacetime lives."

But his girlfriend has changed in their ten years of separation, and Kien finds "there are no trumpets for the victorious soldiers, no drums, no music...The general population just didn't care about them." It's time to move on, the war is over-- but within Kien it is still terribly alive.

He is haunted by memories so vivid and so real that the only way to distance himself from them is to write them down, to pin them to a page and make them stories. They return to him in scenes of cinematic force, with no chronological order, and that is the way he tells about these experiences that come back to life and engulf him once more. He drinks, he writes, he remembers.

"Broken bodies, bodies blown apart, bodies vaporized," this has been Kien's landscape for ten years. He learns that disregarding death is the only way to survive war; now he has to learn to look, body by body, at the way he saw people die. And his readers look with him, in haunted jungles, in blood-soaked mud, in an encounter with a woman who must be killed, in the midst of bombing where " the air cracked like broken glass."

By the end of this book, the numbers cited by military histories have been given a dreadful resonance. During the ten years of Kien's war, five million Vietnamese soldiers were killed. Bao Ninh is one of ten survivors from a battalion of five hundred men.

In Laos and Siam by Marthe Bassene (White Lotus)

It's easy for us 21st century travelers to believe that the practice of adventure travel began with the creation of Lonely Planet, which encouraged anyone with a little extra cash to grab a backpack and a guidebook and set off on the road less traveled. Yet our modern adventures look rather pallid and tame when compared to the travels and travails of Marthe Bassene, a flower of the French colonial system in Vietnam, who went with her husband to visit Laos and Siam in 1909, a journey that at that time was a three-month excursion up the Mekong and into the jungle.

There were no roads, only the trails followed by trade caravans, and Mme. Bassene anticipates "difficulties...and some dangers." Crossing the rapids of the Mekong, with its whirlpools, submerged rocks, sandbars that could hold a vessel captive for months, and its gorges with "walls of rock eighty to a hundred meters high" was a daunting experience in a small steamboat, and one that passengers quickly learn to confront with sang-froid. ("Shut up," is the captain's response to Marthe Bassene's initial cry of fright.)

Her week-long trip from Laos into Siam is equally arduous, riding horseback along a mountainous, rocky trail through the jungle, soaked to the bone by rainstorms, and sapped by "the humid, tropical heat that knocks down all courage." Wearing her husband's clothes because her own are thoroughly saturated, riding barefoot because her shoes are dripping wet, Marthe dreams of sleeping on a bed with sheets, indoors, as she reposes on a camp bed near a bonfire that blazes all night to frighten away tigers.

Throughout her travels, Marthe's observations remain crisp and descriptive. The fragrance of Laos impresses her from her first day and follows her through the country, "a subtle and delicate perfume" that, she decides, "is simply the scent of Laos." Arriving in Vientiane, she finds traces of a ruined city that reminds her of Angkor Wat. Sacked by the Siamese in the previous century, the remains of the temples are shrouded by the roots of trees, covered by vines and brambles, and looted by Europeans as well as the Siamese conquerors. "The time is not far," Marthe observes, "when the Laotian gods will be everywhere, except in Laos."

In the kingdom of Luang-Prabang, she meets King Sisavong, a monarch with a French education and an "ironic smile", who tells her "that he often regrets having left Paris." His hospitality opens the city to Mme. Bassene, and allows her a comprehensive view of life in the palace and on the streets of Luang-Prabang. Visiting the markets, she reveals the beginning of globalization and its effects, as she discovers "poor-quality stuff...with English and German factory labels." Falling in love with the city, she decides it's "the refuge of the last dreamers."

When she arrives in Siam, Marthe finds herself a precursor of the bedraggled backpackers of the future, but as a Frenchwoman, she's well aware of the "distorted version of French elegance" that she presents. "My vagabond-like get-up," she remarks mournfully, "shamed me." As a Frenchwoman, she is also disconcerted by the independent, uncolonized Thai spirit; when forbidden to use a cabin on the upper deck of a boat because she is a woman, she threatens to complain to the governor of Phitsanuloke. "The governor governs the city, I govern my boat," she is decisively told by the Siamese captain, whom she characterizes as a "stubborn mule."

Given the imperial tenor of her time, and the length and difficulty of her journey, it's surprising that Marthe Bassene indulged in so little petulance and national chauvinism. It's equally surprising how easy travel has become in the past hundred years. In 2008, to replicate the trip that Marthe did in 1909 would be the height of masochism--if not completely impossible. But wouldn't it be fun--or at least interesting--to try?