VietNam Le

I'd heard bits and pieces about The Boat before I read it, none of them really giving much indication of what I would eventually read. I wonder what is said about this book at book-groups... I'm sure it's made its way onto the lists of book-groups as diverse as mine and my mother's.

One talking point has been Le's range of literary styles. At times it feels like you are reading a writing exercise rather than something the author has invested himself into - however when looking at this collection as a whole, there really are a few common themes and the author's world-view is gradually and coherently illuminated by each short story.

One theme in a few of the stories is trying to find an authentic approach to circumstances/history etc. In what seems to be a more autobiographical story, Nam debates about whether to use his Vietnamese heritage, the atrocities witnessed by his father, the difficulty for war-torn communities to adapt to peace, to help sell his writing. 'Meeting Elise' sees a father trying to reconcile with his estranged daughter, who was taken away from him because he cheated on his wife. He is depressed at the passing of his wife's replacement, and without dignity attempt to exploit his decaying health, his accumulated wealth, desperately trying to establish a claim to his daughter, which at some point he gave away. The theme is most openly explored in passages of 'Tehran Calling', when Sarah longs for a tragic past - something she feels could justify her existence and relieve her feelings of unfulfillment.

The range of countries explored in setting and heritage also shows that Nam Le focuses on the growing relationships that exist between people of the world, and how these affect our sense of identity. The differences in the world are accentuated when a woman, oppressed in Iran, could just as easily have left the country a decade earlier and settled somewhere else. How do we respond when we are confronted with one teenager who is attempting to retain his pride by fighting a drop-kick from school, and another teenager who is meeting his fate with his employer after failing to assassinate his best friend? What does it mean to hear in passing that a woman was beaten to death for no other reason than her being born in China, when afterward we hear of the desperation experienced by oppressed Vietnamese attempting to escape to Malaysia? Whether Nam Le is actually that good that he is able of capturing the plight of these characters, or just that good that he seems to capture the plight of these people, many of these stories left me quite overwhelmed and depressed.

In some stories he seemed to get vague toward the end, which Murakami does at times too - sometimes I think this tendency is nice and poetic and sometimes I think it is lazy and confusing! I will give Nam Le the benefit of the doubt here, since the collection certainly proves the worth of his writing. Any preconceptions I had could not have stopped me from realising this.

I wonder how he would approach a novel.