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Nam Le's The Boat
Nov. 8th, 2010 01:10 pm![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
pylduck.livejournal.comI just finished reading and teaching Nam Le’s collection of stories, The Boat (Knopf, 2008). The book won a bunch of awards and was hailed by many reviewers as an impressive debut.
I definitely thought the stories were wonderful. I should note at the outset that Nam Le is actually Vietnamese Australian (not American), but he came to the United States to study at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and then has stayed on in the country as the fiction editor of the Harvard Review. The way Le negotiates his ethnic identity in relation to expectations of the reading public is especially interesting. And as if to drive home that point, in the first story, “Love and Honor and Pity…,” the one that seems most autobiographical, the writer-narrator notes that he doesn’t just write fiction about the Vietnamese refugee experience.
Like Anis Shivani’s collection of stories, Le’s stories roam all over the world. Each story is set in a different geographical-cultural location, and the characters are of different ethnic backgrounds and relationships to their locations. I’ll just mention a few of the other stories: “Hiroshima” takes the perspective of a young girl in Hiroshima in the weeks leading up to the dropping of the atomic bomb in WWII. I like it for the way Le delves into the child’s consciousness, it’s unfiltered and disorganized quality. “Tehran Calling” centers on a (white) American woman Sarah who visits her friend Parvin in Iran, and the story follows Sarah’s experiences of this foreign culture and her attempts to reconcile her understanding of Parvin with the actual woman. “Cartagena” gives us the story of a young teen who becomes a hitman in Colombia, and it eerily creates a world in which the logic of violence suffuses childhood/young teen understandings of friendship.
It’s interesting to contrast Le and Shivani’s collections with Paul Yoon’s Once the Shore, for example (the other collection of short stories I taught in this class), which instead chooses one location and weaves a number of stories in that world and space.
I definitely thought the stories were wonderful. I should note at the outset that Nam Le is actually Vietnamese Australian (not American), but he came to the United States to study at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and then has stayed on in the country as the fiction editor of the Harvard Review. The way Le negotiates his ethnic identity in relation to expectations of the reading public is especially interesting. And as if to drive home that point, in the first story, “Love and Honor and Pity…,” the one that seems most autobiographical, the writer-narrator notes that he doesn’t just write fiction about the Vietnamese refugee experience.
Like Anis Shivani’s collection of stories, Le’s stories roam all over the world. Each story is set in a different geographical-cultural location, and the characters are of different ethnic backgrounds and relationships to their locations. I’ll just mention a few of the other stories: “Hiroshima” takes the perspective of a young girl in Hiroshima in the weeks leading up to the dropping of the atomic bomb in WWII. I like it for the way Le delves into the child’s consciousness, it’s unfiltered and disorganized quality. “Tehran Calling” centers on a (white) American woman Sarah who visits her friend Parvin in Iran, and the story follows Sarah’s experiences of this foreign culture and her attempts to reconcile her understanding of Parvin with the actual woman. “Cartagena” gives us the story of a young teen who becomes a hitman in Colombia, and it eerily creates a world in which the logic of violence suffuses childhood/young teen understandings of friendship.
It’s interesting to contrast Le and Shivani’s collections with Paul Yoon’s Once the Shore, for example (the other collection of short stories I taught in this class), which instead chooses one location and weaves a number of stories in that world and space.
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