The Boat

published	May 13th 2008 by Alfred A. Knopf
binding	Hardcover
isbn	030726808X (isbn13: 9780307268082)
pages	288
description	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 t...more [close] 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 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 of 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 aging New York painter mourns his body’s decline as he prepares to meet his daughter on the eve of her Carnegie Hall debut. And with graceful symmetry, the final, title story returns to Vietnam, to a fishing trawler crowded with refugees, where a young woman’s bond with a mother and her small son forces both women to a shattering decision. Brilliant, daring, and demonstrating a jaw-dropping versatility of voice and point of view, The Boat is an extraordinary work of fiction that takes us to the heart of what it means to be human, and announces a writer of astonishing gifts. [close]
date added	01-17-08 edit book

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Ginnie rated it:

06/03/08

bookshelves: family, short-stories

The stories are so different from one another it is hard to believe all seven are the work of a single author. Each character has a distinctive voice that instantly sets him or her (Le is just as skilled with a female narrator) apart.

What they all have in common is that each one portrays its characters in a crisis that reveals resources of courage and resilience even he or she was not aware of. All but one of the stories concern what is arguably the deepest, most complex and most poignant of...more

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Suzi rated it:

06/24/08

Read in June, 2008

From my paper (review here):

Without the excesses of the Truman Doctrine, I daresay Nam Le’s gorgeously crafted first book never would have entered the world’s consciousness.

Historical digression (skip to the next paragraph if you know this already): The Truman Doctrine, laid out in 1947, says that “it must be the policy of the United States to support free pe...more From my paper (review here):

Without the excesses of the Truman Doctrine, I daresay Nam Le’s gorgeously crafted first book never would have entered the world’s consciousness.

Historical digression (skip to the next paragraph if you know this already): The Truman Doctrine, laid out in 1947, says that “it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.” This bold statement came at the start of the Cold War, soon after Winston Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech set the tone of fear that communism would rapidly advance across Europe. Truman’s speech helped the U.S. justify interventions and invasions in a variety of countries, starting with Greece but hardly limited to Europe — and clearly including Vietnam.

From that country, Nam Le’s family fled to Australia when he was a child. Le became a corporate attorney at first but pursued his writing life at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His lovely book of short stories shows the imprint of that education, which puts a premium on prose suffused with the beauty of English, especially at moments of unspoken emotional crises. In the impressive opening story “Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice,” the narrator, who closely resembles but isn’t identical to the author, must deal with issues that hit Iowa grad students of color especially hard: literary white folks’ romance with, jealousy of and dismissal of literary work by people of color. Should the narrator write stories about his “ethnic” past? He tries during a visit from his father. At a moment of immense narrative tension, Le writes, “The river was behind him. The wind was full of acid. In the slow float of light I looked away, down at the river. On the brink of freezing, it gleamed in large, bulging blisters.” Short story readers sense a neon sign blinking, “Emotional revelation ahead!”

But then, Le, merely 29 years old, often succeeds with both the beauty and the revelations. In five of the six other stories, he moves the reader through life as a young girl just before the bombing of Hiroshima; a 14-year-old kid in the slums of Medellín, Colombia; an 18-year-old kid in a dying Australian port town; a young American woman visiting Tehran; and a successful, wrecked older artist in New York. Impressive, no? Except for the Hiroshima story, so clearly constructed from hours of research (and so similar to Keiji Nakazawa’s great graphic novels Barefoot Gen), these first- and close third-person narratives capture glimpses of intensely felt lives. And the final story, “Boat,” returns to the issue of “the ethnic writer” as Le recreates the life of one Vietnamese refugee trying to find tenuous threads of survival, love and community on the unimaginably horrific journey.

Save for Le’s Australia story (really a novella), his entire book reflects, in some way, the consequences of U.S. foreign policy. ...less

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