The Boat, the first book of Vietnamese-born Nam Le, has taken the English-speaking literary world by storm, certainly in Australia and the US. The author left Vietnam when very young and eventually arrived in Australia. He subsequently began work as a lawyer but gave that up to enroll in creative-writing courses in the US. He now divides his time between these two countries.
The book consists of seven short stories (itself unusual for a first publication) and each of them is entirely different — in setting, style, and the point of view of the narrator or principal character. Only the first and last stories, both immensely strong, feature Vietnam, though neither has it as its principal location. Others are set in Colombia, Iran, Japan, Australia and the US.
Every story is a tour de force of imaginative sympathy and thoughtfulness. The one set in Japan, for example, is entirely phrased in the words of a small girl in Hiroshima in the days before the unleashing of the atomic bomb — she talks with gentle innocence of butterflies, flowers, the revered emperor, the war effort, and the lack of danger posed by single American aircraft — they only drop leaflets that it’s forbidden to read, she muses as she plays in the dust.
The Colombia story is set in the drug capital of Medellin and is narrated by a teenager with orders from his gangland boss to kill his best friend. Grenades, pistols and machine guns are part of his everyday life, but by an extraordinary effort of empathy he’s presented by the author as the adolescent he is, and with an adolescent’s attitudes and loyalties, but forced into a terrifyingly adult predicament.
The story set in Teheran features an American woman who’s visiting an Iranian friend she got to know in the US. She labors under multiple levels of incomprehension, and yet Iranian society is displayed in extraordinary detail — the food, the furnishings, the views from the city, the religious and other customs. I found it the least satisfying of the stories because I didn’t understand why it ended as it did, but even so overall this is a quite exceptional book.
Nam Le is something of an intellectual writer — his vocabulary is extensive and even occasionally abstruse, and one of his greater strengths is giving characters the ability to look deep into themselves and ponder on why they’re thinking as they are. But there’s nothing whatsoever pale or abstract about these stories, none of Colm Toibin’s willingness to leave stories without a traditional ending or of Kazuo Ishiguro’s trademark understatement. Instead, violence is everywhere in this book, sometimes on the surface but, if not, then just beneath it.
The opening and closing stories featuring recent Vietnamese history are terrifying. In the first a student of Vietnamese extraction is studying on a creative-writing course in Iowa (exactly as Nam Le did — and this ability to be quasi-autobiographical in one story, and then write about a country he’s never even been to in another, is part of his enviable strength as a writer). His father is visiting Iowa, and he’s made to be a survivor of the My Lai massacre. This enables Nam Le to juxtapose young American GIs then — one in a bead necklace and baseball cap who taps his grandfather on the top of his head with his rifle butt, then twirls round and slides his bayonet into his throat — with his contemporaries at Iowa, making jokes about his “ethnic” stories and how much money he can make from them.
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