A very well written collection of short stories. For the audio version, each story was read by someone with a voice matching the main protagonist. It highlighted how Le was able to adopt the voice of people from multiple nations, genders, and ages with remarkable skill. The stories are very dark and weave a common thread which we all share, death. Unique collection. ( )

Breathtakingly brilliant ( )

The Boat, Nam Le's debut short story collection, starts predictably enough with an autobiographical story about a Vietnamese student at the Iowa Writers' Workshop hosting his father for a visit. This story has everything we've come to expect from such stories: the tension between Westernized children and their more traditional parents, the pressures to assimilate conflicting with the desire to retain individuality, and the feelings of not truly belonging to any particular culture or people. Despite these clichéd elements, this first story, titled Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice, is the best in the collection. Le uses familiar themes to perfectly craft a story that is both heartbreaking and shocking.

After the first story, everything familiar evaporates. The second story, Cartagena, takes place in the Columbia slums and is told from the perspective of a sicario (an assassin) who has been ordered to assassinate a friend. The next story is told by an aging artist in New York City, confronting his bodily failings and attempting to come to terms with the fact that his grown daughter doesn't want to see him. Other stories in the collection cover the globe, including Australia, Japan, Iran, and the South China Sea.

The Boat illustrates Le's agility with language and his mastery of the short story form. Clearly, Le has talent in spades, but something is lost in this blatant display of virtuosity. As we're racing around the world, we're left wondering what Le's really trying to say besides "See what I can do?" A couple of the longer stories (e.g., Halflead Bay and Tehran Calling) read like fragments from novels rather than fully realized short stories. Despite these (mostly) minor failings, The Boat is an impressive debut from a writer to watch in the future.

This review also appears on my blog Literary License. ( )

This little collection of gems has been keeping me from other reading projects over the last month. Each of Nam Le's stories drew me in and left me sated and lost in thought as well as more than a little envious of the talent displayed in this debut collection.

Like the best short stories, these are subtle, nuanced tales, each very different in terms of setting and place and voice and with a different pain to dissect. Nam Le has a beautiful turn of phrase and he absolutely puts you in the moment with all your senses- you think that clouds have been described every which way they can be until you find "clouds streaks [that] were blue-bruised against the sky the colour of skin".

His eye for the telling detail is superb and he is clearly flexing his muscles in these stories, experimenting, trying to work out his boundaries. Not every story is brilliant but some of them are lyrical, tragic, painful, unforgettable.

I will certainly be looking out for more from Nam Le - I fear he will only get better. ( )

Often referred to as a collection of short stories, I believe that Nam Le's The Boat begs to be read as a novel of sorts, seemingly disjointed but ultimately underpinned by some unifying factor that...I admit I am yet to uncover.

One theory I have about this unifying factor is found in the challenge Le issues in the first section, "Love and Honour and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice", when he reflects sardonically upon the category of ethnic literature. What do we want from Le's writing when we read him? Do we want what this first story ostensibly offers - the story of the difficult relationship between a Vietnamese father and son where this Vietnameseness may be the issue or cause of tension? Do we crave his authentic ethnic voice? By jumping from this to the voice of a young South American gang member, to an ageing New York artist, to an rural Australian teenager, to a heartbroken American woman and, finally, to a refugee boat Le issues a challenge to us as readers - what do we think is authentic, especially now, and why do we desire it?

Le's writing is beautiful and frequently heartbreaking. He captures each character, their voice and their place so completely that I felt pleasantly jarred as I moved between each section. Le is undoubtedly a welcome new voice in Australian literature but his work speaks to us all. ( )