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The Boat

by Nam Le

3.6 of 5 stars 3.60 · rating details · 2,188 ratings · 424 reviews

A stunningly inventive, deeply moving fiction debut: stories that take us from the slums of Colombia to the streets of Tehran; from New York City to Iowa City; from a tiny fishing village in Australia to a foundering vessel in the South China Sea, in a masterly display of literary virtuosity and feeling.

In the magnificent opening story, “Love and Honor and Pity and Pride a...more

Hardcover, 272 pages

Published May 13th 2008 by Knopf (first published January 1st 2008)

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Jun 20, 2008 Emily rated it 1 of 5 stars

*sigh* Where do I even begin with what went wrong with this book. It started off so well. Certain scenes are so well described that I was really invested as a reader. However, I hate the way he ends each story... or rather, doesn't.

The first story felt like a good introduction chapter to a novel, except it's not a novel it was just a short story on its own. In turn it made the story have a horrible ending with a quick sum-up of what the character understood from the events in a few sentences.

I...more

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Dec 14, 2009 TD rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, short-stories

Confronting the Real

In the final story “The Boat” in Nam Le’s collection of the same name, Mai is adrift in a grossly over-crowded boat of refugees fleeing Vietnam. With no food, a dwindling water supply, scant shade and amidst inhuman (or all too human) squalor, Mai recalls her father’s return from a communist re-education camp in Vietnam. He could no longer see; it is unclear whether he was blind or simply unable to recognise his surroundings. He never spoke to her of his experience, but trapp...more

Confronting the Real

In the final story “The Boat” in Nam Le’s collection of the same name, Mai is adrift in a grossly over-crowded boat of refugees fleeing Vietnam. With no food, a dwindling water supply, scant shade and amidst inhuman (or all too human) squalor, Mai recalls her father’s return from a communist re-education camp in Vietnam. He could no longer see; it is unclear whether he was blind or simply unable to recognise his surroundings. He never spoke to her of his experience, but trapped in the boat and facing her own death Mai understands now “how necessary it was to stay on the surface of things. Because beneath the surface was either dread or delirium.” This transports us back to the collection’s opening story, "Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice”. Nam, who shares many biographical features with his creator, realises in a future both within and outside the story’s time frame why it was that his father, visiting him in America while Nam attends his Iowa Writers course, burnt the story Nam wrote relating the horror of his father’s background and ordeal in a similar Vietnamese re-education camp. In this story Nam’s moment of empathy with his father is expressed figuratively: “And it occurred to me then how it took hours, sometimes days, for the surface of a river to freeze over...and how that world could be shattered by a small stone dropped like a single syllable”.

In both of the stories which book-end this collection, the fathers’ reactions to the imminence of death is similar; in one it is a shutting down and in the other a smoothing over, but both are a form of suppression, and it is the reaction of Le’s characters to the ineluctable which is to be the theme threading the multifarious stories of “The Boat”. In “Halflead Bay” a boy faces down the town thug, thus proving he has the courage he will need to cope with his mother’s approaching death. In “Cartagena” a young street killer faces death and must weigh the choices and actions of his life. The title “Hiroshima” surely speaks for itself. “Meeting Elise” finds a New York artist confronting mortality and the cold plaque of rejection by his estranged and gifted musician daughter. And finally “Tehran Calling” depicts a young lawyer desperately seeking meaning in life and exposing herself to an intimidating, alien city.

But if this provides the thematic link, the first and last stories differ in that they appertain to Nam Le’s own background. This is a distinction “Love and Honor” draws the reader’s attention to. This story deals with (presumably) Le’s self-consciousness in exploiting his own ethnic background for material, particularly when that background is one of horrific ordeal. “They will read and clap their hands and forget”, advises Nam’s father. When his father burns the biographical story Nam has written for his writing course, (ironically his father is with a homeless man when he does this - Nam can’t see the forest for the trees), Nam eventually comes to a new respect for both his father’s silence and the harshness of his own upbringing. But there is an odd temporal break in the final paragraph of this story; Nam doesn’t come to this understanding within the story’s time frame; this understanding will only come with time, time presumably represented by the stories leading up to “The Boat”; not until then do we encounter Le tackling the ethnic angle so self-consciously deferred in “Love and Honor”.

So first Le’s stories must turn to the world: Australian small towns, impoverished child assassins, Hiroshima etc. But does this turning outward solve the ethical problems involved with “selling out” one’s origins? What these stories demonstrate is Le’s enormous proficiency as a writer, but one gets the feeling it is proficiency applied; I have seen his writing described in The New York Times as “striving for otherness”, which I feel is an apt description. This striving, the lyricism and emotional intensity Le uses to draw his reader in and create verisimilitude, is on occasion more and less successful – “Halflead Bay” and “Meeting Elise” both feel well accomplished, whereas the force of effort is more exposed in “Cartagena” and “Hiroshima”. But in all cases the reader feels that while Le’s characters may have to confront the real in the situations they are involved in, Le himself shelters in the lee of his abilities.

In my opinion the most successful story in the collection is “Tehran Calling”, primarily because it is in this story that Le hits the figurative nerve end of his own writer’s predicament. Here we meet young lawyer Sarah who has “calibrated herself to be above average in all the average ways”. Sarah has just ended a relationship through which she sought vicarious self-affirmation to disguise the conviction she is a person of no substance. She accepts an invitation to visit her activist friend Parvin, a person whose political passion Sarah is suspicious of, in Tehran. Here Sarah is confronted not only with the culture shock of the foreign “there was a different sun here, somehow; more impersonal”, but also with her friend’s obdurate convictions on women’s rights, convictions which result in Parvin’s disappearance and probable arrest during an official religious celebration. Sarah, with her friend and guide gone, must face the daunting nullity of her own being and aloneness. This seemingly mirrors Le’s relationship to his stories. He comes to them, the superficial tourist searching for authenticity in otherness, building up convincing details and characters with enviable literary aptitude, but in these stories the reader never quite has the sensation that the writing takes over, never feels the writing’s nervous system feeding back on itself, and never quite escapes the conviction that what Le engages in is (very proficient) mimicry. This is perhaps unfair, for Le is certainly a wonderful writer and if I had stumbled on any one of these stories in isolation, I perhaps wouldn’t be making these remarks. However I didn’t, and read as a collection it appears more than just aesthetic concerns decided “The Boat” would close the account.

Having travelled the realist path of each story hitherto, has Le earned the privilege to indulge finally in his “Ethnic Story”? After all, the choice between “my story” and “other story” which “Love and Honor” poses needn’t be the issue. Le’s realism and “striving for otherness” never permits his writing to spark from representation to inspired object in its own right. The story “The Boat” shares much with Vasily Grossman’s story of Sofya Levinton and David in his novel “Life and Fate”; both Sofya and Mai are caring for a young boy, Mai for Truong as he slowly dies of exposure and starvation, Sofya for David as the group they are with is herded towards execution by the Nazis, and both Sofya and Mai feel they become mothers to their charge right on the moment the child dies. From “Life and Fate”:

This boy, with his slight, bird-like body, had left before her.
“I’ve become a mother,” she thought.
That was her last thought.
Her heart, however, still had life in it: it contracted, ached and felt pity for all of you, both living and dead...”

Of course unlike Mai, Sofya dies in the gas chamber alongside the child David, but as her life tapers, her heart expands, and pity and compassion encompass more than just the child expired in her arms, the story more than the horrors suffered by the Jewish during World War Two. The question of the story’s realism and authenticity to the Jewish experience is subsumed into what it tells us about humanity. In “The Boat” Truong dies and his body is thrown from the aft. Mai and Truong’s mother meanwhile join the crowd gathering at the prow as land approaches; already they are trying to suppress Truong’s death by “staying on the surface of things” and concentrating their sight on the otherness of the approaching land, “that impossible place”. And in the stories in this collection, one feels Le too stays on the surface in his strive for authenticity in otherness, rather than delving into the “dread and delirium” of his own writing, ethnic or otherwise, to discover what in it might count for all of us.

(less)

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Feb 04, 2009 Brendan rated it 4 of 5 stars

like Bon Iver's debut album of last year this book proves that sweet art will make its way when it's at it's least eager. a quiet, brilliant idyll. each story sent me on a one hour walk around the canyons. the first one and the last one were my favourites and 'halflead' could've been a winton short from 'the turning'. im officially jealous of this vietnamese australian master-craftsman.

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Dec 29, 2008 Thomas rated it 4 of 5 stars

"Faulkner, you know," my friend said over the squeals, "he said we should write the old verities. Love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice."

This quote is planted square in the middle of Nam Le's opening story, a metafictional conceit that allows the author to address the reader directly about how ethnicity and the immigrant experience can both confer a special status on an author while also becoming a crutch, hobbling his imagination.

That's precisely what I admire so much a...more

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Nov 21, 2008 Mike rated it 3 of 5 stars Recommends it for: fans of short fiction, on the lookout for new stars

Okay -- "Halflead Bay" is dazzling, a 5-star story stretched some 50 pages (novellette? novella?) and I wish it had been more. I found myself immersed in the local, its own language and rhythms, the social and familial structures and struggles revealed with a confident, understated narrative structure. And writing that without razzle-dazzle dazed me, like a throwaway observation of trucks "ripping skins of water" off the roadway.

I enjoyed the last two stories, as well, yet found the other four s...more Okay -- "Halflead Bay" is dazzling, a 5-star story stretched some 50 pages (novellette? novella?) and I wish it had been more. I found myself immersed in the local, its own language and rhythms, the social and familial structures and struggles revealed with a confident, understated narrative structure. And writing that without razzle-dazzle dazed me, like a throwaway observation of trucks "ripping skins of water" off the roadway.

I enjoyed the last two stories, as well, yet found the other four stories merely okay, and--can we talk?--a bit aggravating. There's a kind of story that relies on literary ventriloquism, quickly sketching with occasional nuggets of another language and carefully-researched scenic and/or historical details. E.g., write a story about a kid in Vichy France: "The gendarmes bicycled past the house, so we hid the menorah." Wait--even better -- London in the Blitz!: "The bobbies tapped their batons on our window, scowling in and pointing to the sky, reminding us to pull the shades, as the jerries could show up at any time." Le is way, way better than this.... even as a story about Hiroshima could, if you were feeling ungenerous, fall all too squarely into this camp.

But unlike my ludicrous examples, Le is good at the ventriloquism; what bothered me about a few of these stories was that they seemed too literary, ornately and precisely "real" in exact inverse proportion to how they moved and engaged me. That's unfair -- even the worst ("Hiroshima") was okay, and the others I'm complaining about were fine, if unexceptional. (Having just read Zadie Smith's critique of a certain kind of literary realism I'm probably seeing evidence of her compelling complaints more than I would otherwise...) And, see above: at least one is a classic, and a couple others quite good. But when the narrative structure in the first three stories, even 'though ranging from workshop Iowa to barrio Columbia to Philip-Roth's aging-reprobate New York, is exactly the same present-past-present-past-presentclimaxsmallresolution, I get wary of trumpeting the range, too caught up in the template.

Still, recommended--you owe it to yourself to see where this guy is now, and did I say to read "Halflead Bay"? Read "Halflead Bay".(less)

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Nov 12, 2009 Layne rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: travel

This is a book for those who believe that well-constructed art is not just what's nice to look at, but that which effectively causes the observer to feel. It's an extraordinarily poignant collection of stories about far-flung places and times that starts with a memory of Vietnam, penetrates the dark world of Colombia's slums, and accompanies an adolescent boy in a remote Australian fishing village as he navigates the dichotomous journeys of losing his mother and experiencing his first love. It w...more

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Mar 12, 2009 Stephanie rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: immigrant-lit

THE first story in this debut collection by Australian writer Nam Le, 29, has the wonderfully bombastic title Love And Honor And Pity And Pride And Compassion And Sacrifice. A catalogue of the "old verities" Faulkner urged writers to write about, it suggests that all storytelling should go back to some fundamental, universal truth about the human condition.

This search for the fundamental takes centrestage in a story that also serves a dual purpose as the introduction this collection by Le, the f...more

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May 02, 2011 Benito rated it 4 of 5 stars

I had heard good things about this book and then picked up a copy at the home of a misguided amorosa and started reading. Straight away I thought damn, this cat can really write! The amorosa ended badly, though I did get a short story out of it, which I dictated into my Nokia later on the steps of the Newtown schule. Through all the regrets I still couldn't get Nam Le's beautiful prose out of my mind (everything happens for a reason perhaps?) so I finally bought it. Let's hope the majesty of the...more

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Aug 17, 2008 Paul rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2008

I'll admit it. I sort of fell in love with this book's cover as soon as I sawl it on the New Fiction table at Bailey/Coy. I hemmed and hawed, picked it up and put it down, then finally let Michiko Kakutani and Mary Gaitskill convince me to fork over the $25. What I got from these stories, initially, was a really strong McSweeney's vibe. I couldn't quite put my finger on why this was, but the feeling was sustained, and eventually I figured it out. In the first story, Le writes about a writer stru...more I'll admit it. I sort of fell in love with this book's cover as soon as I sawl it on the New Fiction table at Bailey/Coy. I hemmed and hawed, picked it up and put it down, then finally let Michiko Kakutani and Mary Gaitskill convince me to fork over the $25. What I got from these stories, initially, was a really strong McSweeney's vibe. I couldn't quite put my finger on why this was, but the feeling was sustained, and eventually I figured it out. In the first story, Le writes about a writer struggling to write a story for a Iowa workshop. The writer is Vietnamese, like Le, but he doesn't want to write about Vietnamese people, since he feels like this'll be an "Ethnic lit is really hot right now" copout. In the remainder of the stories save one, he writes about anything but Vietnam. The jacket's flap says it all: "stories that take us from the slums of Colombia to the streets of Tehran; from New York City to Iowa City; from a tiny fishing village in Australia to a foundering vessel in the South China Sea." And so what it was, I realized, what was giving me that McSweeney's vibe, was the feeling of reading something that was just slightly less than authentic. And I mean just slightly. The italicized jargon -- of which there's a lot -- doesn't really call itself out as having been researched, and none of the stories feel underdeveloped, but I just couldn't let myself fall completely into the narratives. I thought the stories were good, just not great.

Brief sidenote, check out this sentence: '"The child has the sickness," a voice said without a second thought.' What? A voice said without a second thought? I have no idea what that means, and I'm actually not sure it makes sense.

Anyway, I'd love to read a novel by this guy, since I think the discipline of sticking to one subject might do him well. I just hope he'll embrace his ethnicity, though, so that he can write about pathos and human interaction, rather than trying to prove how un-Vietnamese he is by writing about Colombians and Iranians. Good young writer to keep an eye on.(less)

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Jul 21, 2008 r Guevara rated it 2 of 5 stars

I have to admit, I am still ten pages from finishing this book, but I can't do it anymore! With the exception of the first story, this book bored me to tears. I give it two starts instead of one, because Le is a great writer. At fear of sounding like a literary agent, I will still say that I couldn't relate to any of these characters or their lives. And this is because the writer didn't make it easy for me to relate to them. Le is an excellent writer, but a horrilbe story teller. He never drew m...more

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Jul 02, 2008 nicholas rated it 5 of 5 stars

The Boat is a breathtaking & heartbreaking work of literary genius. Each of Nam Le's stories are a world so completely real & realized that they feel like a living, breathing being. His understanding of human emotions know no boundaries of age, race, country or gender & is only overshadowed by the beauty & mastery of Le's writing. For those who do not read short stories, please do not let that stop you from picking up this book; each story is a novel in itself. The intensity of c...more

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Mar 10, 2008 Richard rated it 5 of 5 stars

Wow! Beautiful. Disturbing. I just read an Advanced Reader's Copy of this book and was particularly impressed by Le's ability to create characters that all convincingly inhabit so many different landscapes and cultures. I was expecting a more specific cultural tone or flavor from this book--but the stories and persepctives are radically different, and are able to stand alone as their own worlds, which to me signals an astounding stylistic range--clearly the writer could have stuck with just one...more

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Aug 21, 2008 Jason rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: everyone

Shelves: read-since-being-out-of-work-jan-2, short-stories

These are quite simply some of the most amazing stories I have ever read. I am not typically an avid fan of short stories. I typically find them little more than character sketches (like E. Annie Proulx's Postcards) or short scenes that are surely a part of a greater whole but simply leave me with a literary hole. But Nam Le has done something amazing with most of his stories -- they smack of realism, the characters are full, the stories hold up on their own and are not just false starts of nove...more

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Apr 24, 2013 Bjorn rated it 3 of 5 stars

The phrase "world literature" always bugged me. While it sounds broad enough, it's often used to mean "all that other literature that's not written in my country and/or the US/UK", often with the added implication (especially in connection with awards) that it's difficult, obscure, or at least exotic. For instance, when Le's The Boat came out and started piling up accolades, I remember reading an article that pointed to The Boat as an example of how all the good reviews in the world couldn't mak...more The phrase "world literature" always bugged me. While it sounds broad enough, it's often used to mean "all that other literature that's not written in my country and/or the US/UK", often with the added implication (especially in connection with awards) that it's difficult, obscure, or at least exotic. For instance, when Le's The Boat came out and started piling up accolades, I remember reading an article that pointed to The Boat as an example of how all the good reviews in the world couldn't make a weird foreign book sell as much as Dan Brown.

Now, obviously very few authors regardless of nationality or critical acclaim sell as much as Dan Brown, so it's a pretty unfair comparison. But I still wonder if it would have occured to anyone to use this book, written in English by an Australian lawyer living in the US, as an example of weird foreign literature had the writer's name been Bill Johnson. Because honestly, if anything stays with me after reading it, it's how original it's not.

Which isn't to say that it's bad. It really is world literature in the literal sense, in that each of the seven stories in it is set in different parts of the world, and Le is obviously aware of the risk of being filed under "exotic foreigner" and deals with it right away in the first story, in which a Vietnamese-Australian writer named Nam Le is told by his friends to stop trying to write general fiction and just write about his Vietnamese father's horrible experiences during the war. Which, as it turns out, isn't a good idea at all. So from there he bounces us from the US to Colombia to Australia to Japan to Iran before finally returning to (or, to be exact, leaving) Vietnam, covering deceptively simple stories about people trying to take some small amount of control of their lives in a world where most things that happen to them are beyond their influence. And even if it's occasionally obvious that Le isn't quite fully developed as a writer yet (more than once, he seems to have started a story with a few overcooked phrases and then stretched the rest of the story to fit them in rather than killing his darlings) he has a great command of emotions and characters. At his best – say, the story about the American woman trying to understand the complexities of Iranian politics, or the Japanese girl in Hiroshima who unknowningly explains to us how indoctrination works – he's almost brilliant.

And yet, I'm left mostly shrugging. His stories have a tendency to fizzle out without really delivering all they could; he doesn't depend on twist endings, which is admirable, but instead he goes the other direction and too often fails to surprise us at all. Here's where I'm puzzled that anyone would think this is in any way difficult literature: it's all basically Babel or Crash, one of those "we're all the same underneath and everything's connected" movies Hollywood has been pumping out in recent years, with some hard questions that are ultimately simplified, dodged and answered only with emotional payoffs. As such, it gets the job done, even if it's mostly a job that's been done before. Does he deserve to be read more than Dan Brown? Well, who doesn't. Give him a few years and a proper plot to hang his writing on and he might deliver, because there's definitely stuff going on beneath the surface. As it is, though, The Boat neither rocks nor sinks.(less)

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Mar 30, 2012 Kay Rollison rated it 4 of 5 stars

Nam Le’s book of short stories, The Boat (2008), has received rapturous praise and seems to have won just about every literary award available to it. After the seagull incident about half way through the fourth story, Halflead Bay, I stopped reading, and only by an effort of will managed to pick the book up again, finish that story, and the other three in the volume. Powerful? Immensely. Enjoyable? No, though there is perhaps something cathartic about the tragedy of the stories.

The range of the...more

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Nov 06, 2011 Ryan rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: fic-literary

***1/2

A collection of short stories that are well-crafted, if a little conspicuously so. As Le explains in his first piece, he's driven by a desire to be recognized for his writing, and not just his Vietnamese heritage, which an adviser suggested that he exploit to capture the attention of trend-conscious literary agents on the lookout for "immigrant" fiction. That piece, exploring the author's complex relationship with his father, who survived the aftermath of the Vietnam War after being on the...more

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Mar 17, 2011 Reema rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: story-collections

great scenes and some muscular, resonant narrative building, but just couldn't get into this. i think i need more careful language than this offered, and i got irritated by the self-absorbed, "masculinist" voice in some pieces which left me looking for a foothold into the story. also, i just don't understand why the pieces needed to range all over the friggin' globe. i mean, what made this cohere as a collection? (i guess i need to muster the patience to read the whole thing through . . . .) see...more

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Jan 01, 2011 Literary Feline rated it 4 of 5 stars

I tend to prefer short stories that delve into the hearts and minds of the characters and that is exactly what Nam Le has done with his collection of stories in The Boat (Knopf, 2008 - Fiction; 272 pgs). I find his writing beautiful at times, while at others somewhat harsh harsh. The stories in the collection are all rather melancholy, the characters flawed and real. My favorite of the stories included the title story, "The Boat," about a mother and child who befriend a young woman traveling on...more

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Feb 08, 2010 Benito Jr. rated it 3 of 5 stars

Le's ability to fully inhabit his wildly disparate characters is the hallmark of this strong and promising debut. His prose doesn't quite leap off the page as does the writing in my favorite short-fiction debut from last year -- that would be Wells Tower's Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned: Stories, which sometimes verges on showy -- but it's elegant and understated nonetheless.

The first story is probably the highlight of the collection, and is the sort of piece that would (or should) be tau...more

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Sep 23, 2009 Younkin Pete rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2009-a-list

This is a fascinating collection of short stories and, like most collections, its hard to give the entire collection a rating when there is a fair bit of variance between the stories. The first story is spectacular and, in my mind, the best and most memorable of the novel. In fairness, my opinion may be colored by the fact that I found that protagonist the most inviting and complicated. The subsequent stories veer from very good to average, in particular I was not a fan of either "Tehran Calling...more

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Apr 20, 2009 Banafsheh Serov rated it 3 of 5 stars

Nam Le's book of short stories, hit our stores under a great umbrella of praise from the literary society. It was picked by book the 'The Tuesday Bookclub' and was the first book chosen for the 'Debra Camron' (702 ABC Radio) bookclub.

Graduate of the Iowa Writer's Workshop, Le has written a collection of unique stories, each with their own tempo and heartbeat. The writing is lyrical and descriptive, taking time to slowly allow the reader a portal view into the background of each character. Le sho...more

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Sep 16, 2011 David Gallin-Parisi rated it 5 of 5 stars

Nam Le writes stories that enthrall, while squeezing out tears of emotion. The first story in The Boat is Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice, and makes the rest of the book overflow with energy, suggesting the challenges writing has for Le: writing about Vietnam, telling meaningful stories, wondering why write at all, and always editing stories. I cannot imagine starting off the collection any other way - reading about writing at the Iowa's Writers' Workshop, communic...more

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Mar 20, 2010 Patty rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: readin10

I just picked up this book from the "New Books" shelf at the library on a whim and I was blown away. This is a first book by Nam Le and it is short stories. But they are a collection of unique stories, each with their own tempo and heartbeat. The writing is lyrical and descriptive, taking time to slowly allow the reader a view into the background of each character.

We've all heard the advice to write about what you know. So I think what was most amazing to me was the diversity of the stories. Le...more

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Nov 04, 2008 Karlan rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: adult

This terrific book of short stories should win awards this year. The stories are so well written that I visualized all the characters and scenes without being aware of detailed descriptions. Although the author is originally Vietnamese, the stories are set in a variety of countries. Many have teens as major characters so it would be interesting to see what a mature teen thought of the collection.

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Oct 29, 2012 Cat Lancaster rated it 4 of 5 stars

I'm always nervous going into a book with expectations and "The Boat" had been on my To Read list since it took Australia by storm a couple years ago. So when a friend offered it as a good read for my trip overseas - thinking short stories are easy to dip in and out of - I was excited and a bit nervous. It didn't disappoint. The first and last stories which are most clearly drawn from Le's own experiences are enough to make it worth while. The characters, though often not particularly likeable,...more

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Feb 05, 2009 Bookmarks Magazine added it

With this debut collection, Le has become the new literary darling. Every critic marveled at this powerful new voice in fiction, a young writer whose characters are so emotionally and psychologically rich that they simply transported reviewers to new worlds and eras. Le's remarkable range of characters, subjects, settings, and perspectives "beggars belief," says the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Indeed, Le "puts his searching, observant voice wherever he likes"

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Jan 13, 2009 Ann rated it 3 of 5 stars

The last book of short stories I remember staying with me this way was Jhumpa Lahiri's _Interpreter of Maladies_ and only on a second read. And, in the same way I felt inclined to weigh her stories against one another, I do the same in looking at Le's book. While not all of the stories in Nam Le's book prove to me to be of equal caliber to one another, I appreciate the type and variety of character detail he has managed to achieve in several of the stories. His longer stories do this better than...more

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Sep 03, 2012 Janet rated it 4 of 5 stars

The word that leaps to mind here is "accomplished". The stories were polished; the collection came together as a whole,making the similar story arcs a strength rather than a weakness of the collection. On the whole, Le does a good job of creating believable, disparate characters. And while each story has loss at its emotional core, they are sufficiently different from each other for each story to remain interesting and compelling.

Some of the stories ring truer than others. In a couple of cases...more

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Jun 21, 2012 Louise rated it 4 of 5 stars

The first two stories were amazing. Breathtaking. Fantastic. He really inhabited the narrative voice. I seemed to read them in minutes. Of course the first seems too autobiographical. The second Cartagena, clearly isn't, at least I don't think Le was ever a teenage assassin in Colombia. As a reader I got bogged down in the middle four stories. Hiroshima I found a bit too ethereal and poetic for my taste. Halflead Bay, too long and too Winton-esque (can anyone else write a story about a teenage b...more

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Jan 26, 2012 Nesa Sivagnanam rated it 4 of 5 stars

In the opening story, "Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice," a young writer is urged by his friends to mine his father's experiences in Vietnam — and what seems at first a satire on turning one's life into literary commerce becomes a transcendent exploration of homeland, and the ties between father and son.

"Cartagena" provides a visceral glimpse of life in Colombia as it enters the mind of a fourteen-year-old hit man facing the ultimate test.

In "Meeting Elise" an agi...more

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Quotes from The Boat

“The thing is not to write what no one else has written but to write what only you could have written.'
I found this fragment in my old notebooks. The person who wrote that couldn't have known what would happen: how a voice hollows how words you once loved can wither on a page.” — 2 people liked it

“The thing is not to write what no one else could have written, but to write what only you could have written.” — 2 people liked it

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