The Boat - Nam Le

The Boat
Nam Le
Hamish Hamilton

Nam Le's book of short stories, hit our stores under a great umbrella of praise from the literary society. It was picked by book the 'The Tuesday Bookclub' and was the first book chosen for the 'Debra Camron' (702 ABC Radio) bookclub.


Graduate of the Iowa Writer's Workshop, Le has written a collection of unique stories, each with their own tempo and heartbeat. The writing is lyrical and descriptive, taking time to slowly allow the reader a portal view into the background of each character. Le shows great talent in weaving charactors as diverse as a Colombian hit man living life on the edge; an elderly artist in New York struggling to renew a connection with his daughter; and a teenage boy in a small Australian fishing town dealing with his mother's illness.


Like bookends his two stories about the Vietnamese experiences were by far the most poinant and heartbreaking of the anthologies. I once read that each person has a story in their past that if they told you, would break your heart. Its hard to imagine that Le's own family experiences reflects the experiences depicted in the two stories.


Le is clearly talented and his stories are well crafted. I really wanted to be awe inspired by his stories, but i'm afraid aside from the two Vietnamese ones, the rest left me cold. Most of them had an ambigous ending as if the story simply folded without reaching a resolution. Maybe that was the aim of Le: to confuse us into not forgetting his stories, or maybe I was just not clever enough to follow the ending the author intended me to conclude. Either way, not having a satisfactory resolution retracted from my overall enjoyment.