The Boat by Nam Le is a collection of engaging short stories that give us insight in to seven very different sets of lives.
The first opening story, ‘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.
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.
A child assassin in Columbia is coming to terms with the warrant of his best friend.
Another story, titled simply "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.
The next story follows a young American woman’s search for self-purpose when she visits Iran to support a college friend who is fighting against their way of life to have women’s rights recognized.
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.
I picked up this book from Angus and Robertson as part of their ‘50 books you can’t put down’ promotion. From reading the back of the book I didn’t realise they were separate short stories – I thought they were going to be related or intertwined somehow, but even though they were totally separate stories, they were brilliantly written. Each story has the same author, but Le has a gift for writing each story in a totally different writing style that best suits the theme of the story.
Each story was engaging (but some more so than others depending on your personal interests) and it left me wishing that I could read more of each of them to see how things turned out for them.
I would recommend this book as a quick read – nothing really too heavy but still very thought provoking and culturally rich.
No comments:
Post a Comment