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| The Boat. | 
 enlarge | Author: Nam: Le
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
Category: Book
Buy New: $15.94
New (9) Used (2) from $15.94
Avg. Customer Rating:  15 reviews
Sales Rank: 815194
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 288
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 8.5 x 5.4 x 1.3
ISBN: 1847671608
EAN: 9781847671608
ASIN: 1847671608
Publication Date: 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Brand New. Delivery is usually 5 - 8 working days from order, International is by Royal Mail Airmail
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| Customer Reviews: Read 10 more reviews...
 An amazing literary work written in elegant and clear prose May 16, 2008
19 out of 19 found this review helpful
Perhaps this is the year of short stories. In April Jhumpa Lahiri's "Unaccustomed Earth" was published to the delight of lovers of short stories. And now this dazzling debut, a collection of seven short stories titled "The Boat", by Nam Le. Even though he is only 29 years old, he writes with the wisdom of a very old and experienced writer. The title story is very long, and reads like a novella.
Unlike Lahiri's stories which are mostly about the lives and experiences of immigrants from India in the United States of America, Mr. Le's stories take place around the world, in Vietnam , Iran, United States, Australia, in the slums of Columbia in South America, and in Iowa, and in cities like Manhattan. The first story with a very long and curious title of "Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice", has elements of autobiography, because its protagonist, a man named Nam who, like the author, was born in Vietnam and raised in Australia. And like the author, he is a lawyer who goes to Iowa to take a course in writing. His father suddenly decides to visit him, and a reader can feel the uncomfortable tension between the father and the son. I felt that the father was quite abusive towards his son, lashing him mercilessly, when the writer was a boy.
Of all the stories, I liked "Meeting Elise", about an old painter named Henry Luff, who is dying from terminal cancer, and who decides to meet his estranged daughter, Elise, in a fancy restaurant at the Lincoln Center in Manhattan. It is a very moving story.
Mr. Nam Le's prose is elegant, smooth, and almost lyrical. The sentences shine because of their clarity: "The truth was, he'd come at the worst possible time. I was in my last year at the Iowa Writers' Workshop; it was late November, and my final story for the semester was due in three days. I had a backlog of papers to grade and a heap of fellowship and job applications to draft and submit. It was no wonder I was drinking so much."
This is indeed an amazing and very impressive debut. I wouldn't be surprised if it wins major literary awards such as the Pulitzer or the National Book Award.
impressive debut May 19, 2008
9 out of 11 found this review helpful
although i think "halflead bay" was suppose to be the climactic piece in the collection, my favorite was "hiroshima." i don't know, it might have been the constant repetitions of the japanese slogan ("one hundred million deaths with honor!") that haunted me, especially coming from the narrator a young child but after i finished that story i got chills.
i was afraid he was going to be lahiri-esque but was pleasantly surprised to find that his prose was lyrical, choppy and abstract; very real, in other words. and he's young, only 29 i think.
the biggest triumph of the book is how seamlessly he writes about other people (besides asians) and i think this is really shocking for readers, for critics especially -- that a non-white writer can do that. le's "the boat" succeeds in all the ways that chang rae lee's "aloft" failed. lahiri, lee they are still trapped in the ethnic dialogue, and i don't blame them...it's of their generation. but i'm relieved, freakin celebrating the fact that the immigrant experience, while valuable and eye-opening is being treated with a critical eye now, one that appraises it more honestly especially in comparison to other, more probing questions that we all, immigrant or not, share.
structurally speaking, i liked the fact that his writing was very disparate, wave-like almost. he's a very visual writer, that said, in the last two stories (tehran calling and the boat), i didn't know what was going on sometimes...which might have been the point.
A Short Story Collection that Examines the "Ethnic Literature Thing" June 18, 2008
9 out of 9 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.
 This book is way overrated. Don't waste your time. September 25, 2008
3 out of 6 found this review helpful
The cover of this book should have been a United Colors of Benetton ad. It's like the Nam Le's agent told him, "Write something ethnic" and he nodded. When he pokes fun at writers jumping on the "ethnic" bandwagon in his first story, I had hopes that he would deviate from the dull, overdone "ethnic" phenomenon and do something original. But, no. Instead, he comes up with a wide range of stories that seem to fit certain buckets: "Old man story," "Japanese story," "Iran story." The problem is that despite the wide range of stories, nothing rings true. Nothing feels heartfelt. It all feels contrived and pretentious. I don't deny that his style is polished and some lines were beautiful, but I'd be more interested in reading something with real characters. These stories read like pieces written to impress a workshop teacher. They can be labeled as "important" or "literary." Too bad they are totally boring.
Wonderful collection June 16, 2008
2 out of 2 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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