The last item features 200 Vietnamese emigrants in the 1980s on a fishing boat built for a crew of 15. Horror is piled on horror — storms, excrement, suicides, disease, broken-down engines, no drinking water (let alone food) and sharks. Yet curiously there’s nothing intrinsically sensational about Nam Le’s writing. These things happened, and they’re part of our world, he implies, as are seagulls with their stomachs torn out by fishermen’s hooks, child soldiers, and raped and then executed children.
In place of sensationalism, Nam Le looks inside his characters. His refugees, for instance, aren’t simply anonymous figures but lonely and jealous husbands, women with secrets, individuals with war-torn minds who set out together on a leaky wooden ship into mountainous seas, with worse to follow.
Nevertheless, this book doesn’t really have any political ax to grind. Instead, Nam Le is saying, “Just look! These victims, from all over the world and often very young, were all partway through their real and only lives, yet were subjected to laceration and death for reasons wholly beyond their control or comprehension. And this could be you, or me, and one day it may be.”
But even that is too specific. Each of these seven stories is different, but they do share the results of thinking unflinchingly on the harsh conditions of human existence. There are some discernible themes — difficult relations between parent and child is one of them, present in four of the seven stories. But there’s also the serious writer’s technical desire to create things that are coherent in themselves, but are also distinct from anything that he’s imagined and written before.
That this book is the debut of a major writer is unquestionable. It isn’t only that Nam Le often writes with immense power. He’s also uncompromising (and hence occasionally difficult to follow), in deadly earnest, and writes about the age-old concerns of the greatest artists — love, death, fear, hope, and the profoundest human dilemmas.
When asked in an interview what the strongest fiction was that he’d read that year, Nam Le replied “Cormac McCarthy’s The Road”. Coming from such an impeccable source, I for one won’t need any stronger recommendation.
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