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<a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2599523.The_Boat?utm_medium=api&amp;utm_source=blog_review" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px"><img alt="The Boat" border="0" src="http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41bg2WoeNxL._SL160_.jpg" /></a> <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2599523.The_Boat?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review">The Boat</a> by <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/1147765.Nam_Le">Nam Le</a> 
 <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/22257713?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review"><h3>My review</h3></a>
 rating: 5 of 5 stars 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 human relationships: the bond between parent and child.
 
 Nam Le was born in Vietnam and raised in Australia, but the seven stories in this collection tell of natives of not just those locations, but of Tehran, Columbia, New York City, the Iowa Writers' Workshop, (that foreign land), and finally Hiroshima just before the bomb is dropped. And while the stories share no single character, location, culture, plot, or voice, the reader can't help being haunted by a sense that it is a single story this book tells, a large and worthy story, one pleasant to anticipate reading over and again.
 
 Meeting Elise, is narrated by an aging artist, who has at great expense remodeled his New York City dwelling in such a way that he emerges naked from his bath on full view to passers-by, is at other times all but invisible in restaurants, on crowded streets, and later in the concert hall where his estranged daughter has her acclaimed American debut. Her cello, "a contraption of wood and steel and hair," is silent when the concert's over, the daughter "bowing, neat, precise." She is "floating out there on a skiff of light." In her "severe beauty," the narrator realizes, his daughter "has everything she needs. She has wrung all my weaknesses out of her strong, straight body." He leaves the theater alone. It's raining as he walks out into the night. And there he spots this daughter he has never known "in the walk of a young boy, in the languor of a twenty-year-old—no there—at fifty, on a billboard. Eyes gray. Smile gas-blue. I count her as she passes."
 
 Of all these heartrending stories of pain and loss, the most moving and unforgettable for me in this collection is Halflead Bay, which, at 69 pages, is also the longest story in the book. Rarely have I read such a sensitive and empathetic treatment of adolescent angst, all the more remarkable because the story's main character is shy and inarticulate. Eighteen-year-old Jamie experiences an unaccustomed moment in the limelight as his high school's sports hero, attracting the attention of the glamorous Alison Fischer. But Jamie knows that by encouraging her flirtation, he is setting himself up for a savage beating by her Neanderthal boyfriend.
 
 On a deeper level, the story deals with how Jamie and his younger brother (and by extension their fisherman father) struggle with the knowledge that their mother is dying of multiple sclerosis. As if this were not painful enough, the achingly beautiful bay where they live in Australia, which has provided the family with a good living for generations, is also dying, having been overfished, and is losing its port traffic to nearby Maroomba. The story is especially memorable for its richly poetic Australian vernacular, a language Nam Le clearly feels in his bones.
 
 Le gets it right. He is one of those writers who let you know what's going on from the first sentence, then let you feel the satisfying jolt when things make hairpin turns, and leave you at the end having actually completed the telling of the tale.
 
 Le might be mistaken for transparent in his pure and simple lovely prose, his easy storytelling. But not so fast. The reader finishes this book and wants to start again, because, although these people do not come from our hometown, they do come from our family. They may not eat our food, but we have tasted the same things, or surely will. They have things to teach us that story is the way to learn.
 
 One delights to praise effusively the man who has written this collection, who has done whatever it has taken to make it come to be. Good, honorable work, the sacrifice of privacy, the willingness to give the self to art in every way that is required, from opening veins to living for long months of writing in the middle of the pain of other people.
 
 And so we reach the part of the proceedings where we name the names of writers Nam Le calls to mind. (Zola, Crane, Dreiser, Joyce have been whispered in this regard.) But just this once, what say we forebear. How about we just pay tribute as due and not compare Le's work to anyone's. I would so like to let him to stand alone. He does it well.
 
 Although this is his first published book the future looks bright for Nam Le. As Faulkner observed, voices like his not only record the human condition but also help us endure and prevail.
 
 *************************************************
 In an interview with Mr. Le in today's NYT, Patricia Cohen writes, "The Boat is Mr. Le’s first book, but it is already receiving the kind of praise usually reserved for far more accomplished writers. In The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani wrote, “Mr. Le not only writes with an authority and poise rare even among veteran authors, but he also demonstrates an intuitive, gut-level ability to convey the psychological conflicts people experience when they find their own hopes and ambitions slamming up against familial expectations or the brute facts of history.”
 
 The seven stories display an amazing confidence and range for so young an author, moving from a religious festival in Tehran to the days before an atomic bomb is dropped on Hiroshima to the cardboard shantytowns of Colombia where 14-year-old boys yearn to get “an office job,” slang for work as a hired assassin.
 
 Surrounding these imagined worlds, like bookends, are two stories that draw on details from Mr. Le’s own life. The first, “Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice,” features a young Vietnamese writer named Nam, who leaves his job as a lawyer in Melbourne, Australia, to attend the Iowa Writers’ Workshop; he has an American girlfriend and a folder full of stories that depict children in Hiroshima, Colombian assassins and a New York painter who dines at Picholine.
 
 The last story, “The Boat,” describes a dire 13-day journey from Vietnam to a Malaysian camp, an experience not that different from one that Mr. Le, just a few months old, and his family went through after joining the legions of refugees trying to escape the Communist regime in 1979.
 
 “One of the chief ambitions of the story was to play with that idea of what we consider to be authentic, how much autobiography is implied or assumed, how we read something differently if we think it’s been drawn from the author’s life,”
 
 <a target="_blank" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/14/books/14nam.html?ref=books">http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05...</a>
 
 <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/list/354189?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review">View all my reviews.</a>

Ginnie's review
rating:
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 human relationships: the bond between parent and child.

Nam Le was born in Vietnam and raised in Australia, but the seven stories in this collection tell of natives of not just those locations, but of Tehran, Columbia, New York City, the Iowa Writers' Workshop, (that foreign land), and finally Hiroshima just before the bomb is dropped. And while the stories share no single character, location, culture, plot, or voice, the reader can't help being haunted by a sense that it is a single story t...more

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message 1: by Jessica (last edited 06/03/2008 05:22AM)

06/03/2008 05:22AM

It is rare for a story collection to be praised so highly; I always pay attention when this happens. I've read many stellar reviews of this book & heard the author interviewed on my local NPR affiliate. Must read...