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The Boat | 
| Author: Nam Le
Publisher: Knopf
Category: Book
List Price: $22.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  7 reviews
Sales Rank: 6042
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 288
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 8.4 x 5.7 x 1.2
ISBN: 030726808X
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.92
EAN: 9780307268082
ASIN: 030726808X
Publication Date: May 13, 2008
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Product 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 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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 2 more reviews...
 The Boat July 11, 2008
Steve Koss wrote an insightful review here earlier suggesting a connection between this collection of seven short-stories and ethnic literature. Nam Le is Vietnamese, but only the first and last story are directly about the Vietnamese experience, the rest are a seemingly random mix of people and events from all over the world. Nam Le tells us he "could totally exploit the Vietnamese thing. But instead, [he] choose to write about lesbian vampires and Colombian assassins, and Hiroshima orphans - and New York painters with hemorrhoids." What do Colombian assassins, Hiroshima orphans and hemorrhoid infected New Yorkers have to do with the Vietnamese experience?
Everything. The problem is, as Le says, ethnic literature is "a license to bore. The characters are always flat, generic." Readers are either numb to it because of stereotypes or mental blockage, or have no frame of reference. And as Le's first story shows, the writer can't help but be exploitative in the process. However it is still possible to convey the feelings of the experience through a proxy, and so all of these stories immerse the reader with emotions in preparation for the last story about Vietnamese boat people.
It's been said there is no loneliness more acute than that experienced around other people, in particular family. The New York artist who waits alone in the restaurant for the daughter who never comes; the high school football star who fights his personal battles, but even with his father taking the punches, still faces it alone; the Colombian assassin who faces his destiny without his friends help; in each of the stories the main character is isolated and alienated and faces a great trauma. The experience of reading this book reminded me of when I was child, lost in the crowd, my parents seemingly gone forever and the world a difficult and cold place.
By the last story, "The Boat", the readers sensibilities have been so finely shaped to this sense of alienation, fear and dread that Nam Le is able to convey the Vietnamese boat people "ethnic experience" in a fresh and immediate way. The details and facts are conveyed through the words on the page, but the feeling and sense of experience comes from within. Using this as an interpretive framework, it no longer seems like a collection of short stories but a work greater than its elements, a masterful use of the short story format to touch on universal human experience.
The Boat, by Nam Le June 21, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
I would not say that it's great, but that it's not horrible which makes it good. In terms of other short stories that I've read, MOST of these stories are better than average. The others, I would like to say that the author is trying to test his skill and see if he can accurately depict a situation that is out of his (life) experience. 5/5 overall for the range of stories, characters, and for a book that I did not regret reading.
Fantastic new viewpoint in fiction June 20, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
It's a challenge to come up with something that feels wholly original as a fiction writer. Mr. Le definitely makes strides toward this in THE BOAT. 100% recommended.
 A Short Story Collection that Examines the "Ethnic Literature Thing" June 18, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
THE BOAT is an engaging and free-wheeling collection of seven short stories by first-timer Nam Le, organized in a cleverly self-referential package. In the pivotal first story, "Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice" (a title drawn from William Faulkner's Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1950), a young Vietnamese American lawyer-turned-aspiring author named Nam is visited by his father, just arrived from Australia. Nam has settled in Iowa to attend the renowned Iowa Writer's Workshop.
As he struggles to meet its creative demands and beat his own writer's block, a friend encourages Nam simply to write about Vietnam, since "ethnic literature's hot." Another friend differs: "It's a license to bore. The characters are always flat, generic." It's that last friend who tosses out as an aside, "You could totally exploit the Vietnamese thing. But instead, you choose to write about lesbian vampires and Colombian assassins, and Hiroshima orphans - and New York painters with hemorrhoids." And thus is THE BOAT.
The second story follows the perilous life of Juan Pablo Merendez, an adolescent assassin in Medillin, Colombia as he is called to task by his boss for failing to carry out an execution. Next comes "Meeting Elise," the story of an aging, hemorrhoid-afflicted painter seeking desperately to make amends with his estranged (and engaged) daughter as she makes her Carnegie Hall debut as a concert cellist. Another story, titled simpy "Hiroshima," traces the life of a young Japanese girl moved to the safety of the nearby countryside in the days immediately preceding the dropping of the atomic bomb. "Hiroshima" is sandwiched between two other stories, one a "coming of age" story in a coastal Australian town, the other a "coming to life's purpose" story in Tehran, Iran. After this whirlwind tour, Nam Le returns for the finale to Vietnam for his title story, "The Boat." Not surprisingly, this one is a flight and survival story, focusing on Mai, a young girl cast adrift for days in the Pacific with two hundred other refugees on a smugglers' trawler that has lost its engines.
So what to make of the metastructure? In Nam Le's opening story, the writer Nam succumbs to the pressure of his writing assignment and opts to "exploit the Vietnamese thing." He interviews his father, a survivor of the My Lai massacre, and converts this horrific story relatively quickly and easily into typewritten copy. He awakens the next morning to discover that his father has read and then destroyed the one and only copy. Has Nam Le the author discarded ethnic literature of his own (the figurative tearing up of the My Lai story by his fictional father in the first story) for that of Colombians, Japanese, Iranians, and Australians? And has he, upon attempting to step outside his own ethnicity and into the skins of others, returned unsatisfied to his own Vietnamese experience for his closing story? Is the reader intended to compare the relative merits of Nam's own ethnic (Vietnam-based) stories with those drawn from the world at large? Or are we to see the opening and closing stories as literary "brackets" of the immigrant/ethnic literature genre, one a tale of departure or escape, the other of adaptation and assimilation?
There seems little doubt that the opening and closing stories are Nam Le's most affecting. The opener is touching in its treatment of intergenerational relationships and differences in perception, while the closer is a harrowing tale of sun, salt, thirst, and death for the sake of freedom. In between, the other stories show notable flashes of literary command, but only the "Cartegena" story in Colombia engages the reader with anything approaching the story-telling power of the opening and closing Vietnamese stories.
Perhaps Nam's fictional friend in his opening story is correct, that one writes best about what one knows best, that it really is best to "totally exploit" ethnic literature. In Nam Le's case, THE BOAT shows an emerging authorial talent that promises the possibility of compelling ethnic literature as well as a future range well beyond "the Vietnamese thing." It is quite easy to recommend this book on its merits and also advise readers to keep a watchful eye out for Nam Le's next effort.
Wonderful collection June 16, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
An excellent debut collection of short stories. I particularly liked the author's ability to inhabit different peoples and places and points of view. I never expected to jump around, geographically and otherwise, quite so much as the stories moved, which took me, quite pleasantly, by surprise. Le's prose style is pensive and smooth and it can soar. Very good stuff here; I look forward to other works by Nam Le.
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