The Boat: Stories
by Nam Le
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Book Summary Information
Author: Nam LeEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2009-08-11
ISBN: 0307388190
Number of pages: 288
Publisher: Vintage
Book Reviews of The Boat: Stories
Book Review: `The storm came on quickly.'
Summary: 5 Stars
This collection of short stories is Nam Le's first book. It's a wonderful collection of seven stories, set in different cultures, contexts and countries. Two of the stories are close to Nam's Vietnamese heritage: Nam and his family escaped from Vietnam in 1979 when Nam was just three months old.
The first story, `Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice' is a story about a writer (also named Nam) studying in the USA. Nam is struggling over whether to use his father's account of surviving My Lai and North Vietnamese prison camps as a creative writing assignment. His father does not care for his son's career choice, and does not appreciate his writing.
The final story `The Boat' is a moving account of the flight of refugees, leaving Vietnam by boat hoping to establish a better life in Australia. It's a story with some haunting moments:
`They stood together in silence, the spray moistening their faces as they looked forward, focusing all their sight and thought on that blurry peninsula ahead, that impossible place, so that they would not be forced to behold the men at the back of the boat peeling the blanket off, swinging the small body once, twice, three times before letting go, tossing him as far behind the boat as possible so he would be out of sight when the sharks attacked.'
`Cartegna' depicts a violent Colombia where boys are transformed into men, and corpses, through drugs and gangs, while `Meeting Elise' (set in Manhattan) is the story of a man dying who is trying to reconnect with his estranged daughter. In `Halfhead Bay', a boy lives with his family in an Australian coastal village, while in `Hiroshima' a girl is living in the days before the bomb is dropped. `Tehran Calling' is about a young woman who has returned to her homeland, and is trying to make a difference for those who've been unable to leave.
Seven very different stories, each separate but all connected by a common quest: a search for belonging and a sense of identity. Where (and what) is home, and how do we each define it? I felt this most keenly in `Love and Honor' - a sense that even those who share common heritage can be divided by different experiences and realities. `Love and Honor' takes its title from William Faulkner's 1949 Nobel Prize acceptance speech:
`Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only one question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat. He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid: and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed--love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, and victories without hope and worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.'
Entirely fitting. This is one of the memorable collections of short stories I've read.
Jennifer Cameron-Smith
Summary of The Boat: Stories
The seven stories in Nam Le's masterful collection The Boat take us across the globe, from the slums of Colombia to Iowa City; from the streets of Tehran to a foundering vessel in the South China Sea. They guide us to the heart of what it means to be human ? and herald the arrival of a remarkable new writer.Short Stories Books
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