The Boat (Rough-Cut)
by Nam Le
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Book Summary Information
Author: Nam LeEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2008-05-13
ISBN: 030726808X
Number of pages: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Book Reviews of The Boat (Rough-Cut)
Book Review: A Promising Collection
Summary: 4 Stars
The Boat is a collection of short stories - seven of them, with the longest approaching novella length, They are diverse; each with a very different scenario - ranging from bandits in Colombia; to a young American woman caught up with a resistance movement in Teheran; to Vietnamese refugees on a junk. Nobody can accuse Nam Le of trading on the standard fare of ethnic literature. But that's really a judgement for others to make; readers should praise Nam Le for breaking away from expectations - but when Nam Le does it himself?
This brings us back to the very first story - the improbably titled Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice. In this story, the viewpoint character is a Vietnamese writer in the US, being visited by his father. This prompts soul-searching about what it is to be a writer; what it is to have left the culture of your parents and embraced a foreign culture. The writer in the story appears caught between writing a fiction based on experience - set in a boat fleeing Viet Nam - and writing diverse stories that defy expectations. Oh, and the writer in Nam Le's story is apparently named after Viet Nam. Now given that what unfolds is a set of diverse stories culminating in the boat one, we have a fairly obvious, personal piece of self-analysis. Some people will herald this as a provocative act of genius, but others might think it looks a little bit too raw, too crude. The point of fiction, surely, is to tell common truths through analogy, not to simply set out personal philosophy with no attempt made to change identities or situations. But then, at the end, perhaps fiction does take over. Nam Le's father surely wouldn't have done *that*?
As with all collections of short stories, the success depends on whether or not the reader catches hold of particular stories. Different readers will find different highlights. The Colombian rebel story seemed the most intriguing, but the beautifully simple, clear narrative was let down in the end by an ambiguous ending - again, a device that will be to some tastes and not others. But in getting beneath the stereotypical characters, portraying the real people behind the cartoonish roles, Nam Le seems to be at his best.
This is a promising collection of stories if you can get through the wince factor of the first one. The writing is mostly clear and lucid. Nam Le conjures up images and scenes with few words, but with great precision and detail. There is more to the stories than one might imagine from their length and it would be interesting to see what Nam Le could make of a full length narrative.
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