Nam Le

Nam Le is a Vietnamese Australian author who was born in 1978 in Vietnam and emigrated to Australia with his parents as a baby as one of the boat people who fled the country in the years following the fall of Saigon in 1975.

His book The Boat is a collection of short stories. One involves a man studying creative writing in the US who tries to tap into the ethnic market by writing his father’s stories of living through the Vietnam war. The final story is of the suffering of a group of boat people fleeing Vietnam as refugees. The rest are set in a variety of locations including Colombia, Iran, Japan and a high school story of coastal Australia.

The version I read was just text but I note others read a graphic interactive version. The writing is very clever, but the characters were not always easy to relate to. My difficulty was that- like many short stories- they often end abruptly in an unsatisfying fashion. Also like many award winning stories they were so clever that sometimes I wasn’t sure what the ending even meant or what had happened. So while I appreciated the writing I was relieved when I got to the end.

The fall of Saigon 1975.
Love and Honour…man writing a story for creative writing course writes about his father’s suffering in Vietnam
Cartagena-Colombia teenage gang gallada
Meeting Elise- man meets his daughter after 17 years. Artist. Cancer
Halflead Bay-Australia. Jamie high school student Mum with MS. Fight with big Dory over Alison
Hiroshima- Mayako, war evacuated with children for safety
Tehran Calling-Sarah visits Parvin radio show woman’s rights
The Boat… (mehr)

Finished May 24
Halflead Bay - a novella (similar to Tim Winton) page106 to 185
Teenage sexuality in a country town where everyone knows
everyone else’s business.
Hiroshima p186-203
Cartagena p31-75 : Vietnamese migrants in 1st world

Meeting Elise - p75 to 105: an honourable old man meeting death as suicide
Tehran Calling :204-263: a girl meeting sexual experience out of poverty and lack of safety
The Boat : 264-314 : a group of escaping boat-people - Vietnamese - treat the death of one of them with dignity… (mehr)

Le's ability to fully inhabit his wildly disparate characters is the hallmark of this strong and promising debut. His prose doesn't quite leap off the page as does the writing in my favorite short-fiction debut from last year -- that would be Wells Tower's [b:Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned: Stories|4291946|Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned Stories|Wells Tower|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1255939030s/4291946.jpg|4339519], which sometimes verges on showy -- but it's elegant and understated nonetheless.

The first story is probably the highlight of the collection, and is the sort of piece that would (or should) be taught in Asian American Studies classes as it grapples directly with identity and the work of writing. (But it also means it's the most consciously self-reflexive of the stories, and if I sniff it a little, I imagine the slightly off-putting whiff of Writing Workshop Prompt about it, but it's also the point of the story.) In contrast, my favorite piece was the one I thought I'd like the least: "Meeting Elise", which humanizes an otherwise repellent artist faced with his mortality.… (mehr)