The Boat (Rough-Cut) (Hardcover)

by Nam Le (Author)
Key Phrases: rock pier, soybean rice, Anh Phuoc, Big Sister, Big Brother (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. From a Colombian slum to the streets of Tehran, seven characters in seven stories struggle with very particular Swords of Damocles in Pushcart Prize winner Le's accomplished debut. In Halflead Bay, an Australian mother begins an inevitable submission to multiple sclerosis as her teenage son prepares for the biggest soccer game of his life. The narrator of Meeting Elise, a successful but ailing artist in Manhattan, mourns his dead lover as he anticipates meeting his daughter for the first time since she was an infant. The opening Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice features a Vietnamese character named Nam who is struggling to complete his Iowa Writer's Workshop master's as his father comes for a tense visit, the first since an earlier estrangement shattered the family. The story's ironies—You could totally exploit the Vietnamese thing, says a fellow student to Nam—are masterfully controlled by Le, and reverberate through the rest of this peripatetic collection. Taken together, the stories cover a vast geographic territory (Le was born in Vietnam and immigrated to Australia) and are filled with exquisitely painful and raw moments of revelation, captured in an economical style as deft as it is sure. (May)
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Review
"* 'From the very first page of The Boat, Nam Le's extraordinary talent, range of vision, and moral courage make the reader sit up and take notice. By the last page, one feels a kind of fervent gratitude - rare enough these days - for having been introduced to a young writer whose mark on the literary world, so freshly made, will only grow deeper in the years to come.' - John Burnham Schwartz * 'Nam Le writes with a rare blend of courage and beauty... Book your passage on The Boat. You will not forget the people you meet on the voyage.' - Chris Offutt * 'The Boat is tremendous, challenging and ambitious, worthy of the same shelf that holds Dubliners and The Things They Carried - like those works, it asks to be read as a whole and taken seriously as a book... this book nails our collective now, our kairos, with an urgency and relevance that feels visionary.' - Charles D'Ambrosio * 'The Boat is an impressive feat, and the debut of a very talented writer.' - Adam Haslett" --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; 1 edition (May 13, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 030726808X
• ISBN-13: 978-0307268082
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars See all reviews (27 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #59,666 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An amazing literary work written in elegant and clear prose, May 16, 2008

By	Yesh Prabhu, author of The Beech Tree (Plainsboro, New Jersey) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

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.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Short Story Collection that Examines the "Ethnic Literature Thing", June 18, 2008

By	Steve Koss (New York, NY United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fantastic new viewpoint in fiction, June 19, 2008

By	C. R. Morgan "masked editor" (Brooklyn, NY USA) - See all my reviews

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.