A bunch of short stories that involve relationships of varying types and different cultures. Good filler stories if you’re not ready to dig into a novel. ( )

Well written stories by Vienamese-Australian writer. Each story takes place in a different country and culture. ( )

In a way it is unfortunate that the first tale in the collection is one of the most powerful and beautifully written short stories I have read in a long time. The rest of the collection suffers slightly in comparison to this masterpiece.

At the heart of each story is a sense of loss, each tale in the collection will leave your heart a little more broken, grieving for the the characters whose liveas are laid bare to you.

Well crafted and immersive tales with a strong narrative storyline. They are full of beauty, the psychology of human relationships, humour, loss and yet somehow so much more. ( )

Nam Le’s debut novel is, in fact, a collection of seven short stories beginning with what appears to be an autobiographical account followed by six fiction pieces. Le flexes his hefty writing muscles right from the start. His command of the language is poetic with every word providing power and stimulating all five senses. The versatility of his voice allows Le to alter his style with each story, providing the feel of seven unique authors rather than one author telling many stories. However, while the stories are beautiful to read, they often wander and I was left feeling like I was missing the last few pages of a couple of the stories. In several, the plot is so secondary to the imagery that it felt more like I was reading assignments from a literary writing class that had been cobbled together rather than a coherent story. In spite of this, his characters are so engaging and his visuals so powerful that I was willing to forgo storytelling for awhile just to enjoy the artfulness of Le’s words. I became very attached to each one of his characters - their dark personas and darker circumstances. If any of these stories had been novel-length, the storytelling would have become tiresome. However, the short story format allowed Le to produce artful prose without boring the reader. While I really enjoyed The Boat for providing a rare piece of writing that lives comfortably in the sparsely populated land between the nations of fiction and poetry, it left me both delighted and disappointed at the same time. I’m hoping that this is just the beginning of a long career by an obviously gifted writer. If you are looking for a polished, plot-driven thriller, The Boat is not going to be your cup of tea. But if you are interested in reading something visceral – something that will take you someplace you have never been before - you should give this book a try.

Read my other reviews at www.chadintheazdesert.blogspot.com. ( )

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. ( )

the Boat is an interesting book and there's no doubt that Nam Le is a talented writer, who may well go on to great things. Unfortunately, the stories in this collection don't live up to all the hype and, for me, although there are some small precious gems within the book there are just too many gaps and holes for the writing to work.

He sets out his background and dilemma early on in the first story, Love and Honour and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice:

'It's hot,' a writing instructor told me at a bar. 'Ethnic literature's hot. And important too.'

And then on the next page his fictional friend tells him:

'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 haemorrhoids.'

Sadly I didn't find the lesbian vampires, but all the other characters are present and correct. And that for me is the main problem. While the writing is virtuoso the stories aren't up to snuff. They all read like experiments for his creative writing course (that also crops up in the first story), and I am sure they got good marks, but most left me with a feeling that I only had tiny fragments of what was really happening in these imaginary worlds and these specks weren't enough to bring them into focus.

Even the heartbreaking final story about Vietnamese refugees trying to escape on a fishing boat that breaks down suffers from this problem. The description is superb and the situation is all too vivid, but the characters are obscured and they seem to richochet off each other rather than connecting as they should. ( )

Great stories that transport the reader to diverse locations around the world. Excellent character work in this debut set of short stories, which demonstrates the author's pronounced talent at putting the reader in the shoes of his subjects. ( )

This is a stunning collection of short stories which travels across diverse continents, age groups and issues. Their breadth is amazing, yet each scene is described with the finest detail. You would swear that Nam Le had lived in Iran, Columbia and Tasmania – you can almost smell the fishing jetty in Halflead Bay, the street markets in Tehran, and the stench below deck on the refugee boat. The human stories are told with passion and poignancy. I doubt I will ever forget the last story – The Boat. What a gifted writer he is. ( )

I had heard, of course, that Nam Le’s collection of short stories was very good, but I was surprised to find myself totally agreeing. It is the combination of great effectiveness with his wording, insinuating deeply felt emotions and making recognisable and convincing characters that appeals to me. I also like the range and scope of them – different nationalities and countries and all written with the same assurance so that nothing seems contrived. I particularly liked ‘Halflead Bay’, one that reminded me of Tim Winton’s territory, not just in the coastal aspect but also in the empathetic portrayal of young James. I had to pause and think when, on learning that the mother has MS, Le writes ‘everyone carried on – the working through, around, the illness – as though every moment wasn’t actually a dare. As though every word wasn’t a word more, every act a further act of waiting.’

I also like the understatement and the way the reader’s interest is held not with false suspense but by the situation gradually unfolding as it does in both this story and ‘Cartagena’ with us discovering what is really happening as the narrator does. In fact, using either the first person or the third person limited helps Le to engage the reader with his protagonists, generally well meaning people who find themselves in impossible situations and try to unravel an understanding of themselves.

There are lots of non-sentences in the stories as in the one quoted above, helping to make it feel as if we are getting into the main character’s mind. It’s a pity, though, that the editors didn’t do a better job. Either I’m getting into a cranky and fastidious old bloke or standards of communication are dropping. For example, I can’t see why the following wasn’t made into the two sentences it should be – ‘What’s the saddest place you know,’ she said, ‘this is mine.’ I don’t think Le is indicating here that Alison isn’t really interested in his answer – hence the lack of a question mark as she quickly goes on to say what she really wants to – i.e. this is the unhappy spot for her. There are too many other run-on sentences. I can more readily accept the lack of quotation marks in ‘Cartagena’ where the uncertainty of the situation is reflected in this aspect of the grammar. It was clearly a decision made by Le in this story just as McCarthy uses the lack of them in ‘The Road’ for similar effect.

‘Tehran calling’ was the one that appealed to me the least although one reading of the story is not enough for me to see all that is in it, but I found the main character, Sarah, too weak even though I could understand the way she felt herself ‘as all falsework and nothing within’. This captures what many must feel as they efficiently go about their professional jobs with only a veneer of commitment. I also wonder about how well he captures the female perspective. Maybe I’m too focused on this, but Le has three of his seven stories from a female point of view, and two of them, I felt, worked less well. Still, just as I really enjoyed Guterson’s ‘The Country Ahead, the country behind’ and then really liked his ‘Snow falling on cedars’, so I hope this is the precursor to a full novel by Le (which probably makes it seem as if I have something against short stories. ( )

Brilliant short stories - all so different. Nam Le is able to speak realistically in so many different voices, wholly convincingly. Can't wait to read something else by him ( )

The man can write: Name Le has a credible and sympathetic voice. This collection of short stories ranges from the tale of a Tasmanian grommet in a coastal backwater confronting his worst fears, to an American lawyer travelling to Tehran with a broken heart to join a revolution. Le's characters are fragile and deeply flawed - scarred people who surprise the reader with their perserverance when hope is gone. ( )

Steve Koss wrote an insightful review on Amazon, I agree with everything he said and wanted take it a step further. As Steve says the first story is the key to the book - Nam Le tells us he "could totally exploit the Vietnamese thing. But instead, [he] choose to write about lesbian vampires and Colombian assassins, and Hiroshima orphans - and New York painters with hemorrhoids." Why? These are strange things to write about and the question is what do they have to do with the ethnic literature?

Everything. The problem is, as Lee says, so-called ethnic literature is "a license to bore. The characters are always flat, generic." We as readers are either numb to it because of over-use or no frame of reference. However it is still possible to convey the feelings of the experience through a proxy, and so all of these stories immerse the reader with certain themes in preparation for the last story. Each story is similar in its exploration of alienation and loneliness in the face of a crisis, usually with death hanging over all.

It's been said there is no loneliness more acute than that experienced around other people, in particular family. The New York artist who waits alone in the restaurant for the daughter who never comes; the high school football star who fights his demons, but even with his father taking the punches, still faces it alone; the Colombian assassin who faces his destiny without his friends help; in each of the stories the main character is isolated and alienated and faces a great trauma. The experience of reading this book reminded me of when I was child, lost in the crowd, my parents seemingly gone forever and the world a difficult and cold place.

By the time we get to the last story of the book, "The Boat", our sensibilities have been so finely shaped to this sense of alienation, fear and dread that Nam Le is able to convey the Vietnamese "ethnic experience" to just about anyone in the world. The details and facts are the words on the page, but the feeling and sense of experience comes from within ourselves. Within that interpretive framework this no longer seems like a collection of short stories but a work greater than its elements, a masterful use of the short story format.

--Review by Stephen Balbach, via CoolReading (c) 2008 cc-by-nd ( )

Having a few minutes to reflect on this book, I'm realizing all the stories in The Boat are about love, family and friendship. All the stories are of loss and impending heartache, as well as survival. Nam Le's writing in visceral and beautiful at the same time, and he writes such reality that it seems like watching them via spycam.
For my full review, click http://thekoolaidmom.wordpress.com/20... ( )