The Boat (Penguin-Hamish Hamilton 2008) is the stunning first book by young writer Nam Le, who was born in Vietnam, grew up in Melbourne, and is now living and working in the United States. Published to wide critical acclaim, Nam Le was awarded the 2008 Dylan Thomas Prize for “the best published writer in English under the age of 30 from anywhere in the world”.
Although comprising a collection of seven short stories, any one of which can be read on its own, in its entirety The Boat can be thought of as a ‘constellation’ - like a disparate group of stars that are physically and historically distant from one another but arranged in a way that encourages us to focus on the connections and inter-relationships between them. Constellations, because they are a construction of where we stand, also position us as much as we position them. Nam Le’s writing, in its use of a diverse range of voices and subject positions, explores similar spaces in the relationship between writers and readers, and between writers and the worlds and characters they create.
It is no coincidence that the majority of the review excerpts that fill the introductory pages of this publication are written not by professional literary critics but by accomplished authors because The Boat is, without drawing attention to itself, a book about writing and storytelling, and especially about the writer’s precarious and vicarious occupation of characters whose worlds we recognise but which most of us are unlikely to ever share. In fact, one of its aims, taking the lead from the clearly semi-autobiographical narrator of the first story who struggles to resist the pressure to restrict himself to writing ‘ethnic stories’, is to tackle head on this tension between the exhortation to draw from experience, and the right of an author not to be shackled to the perspective of his or her own time, place, gender or ethnicity. In raising this theme from the outset, Nam Le embarrasses any assumptions about the sort of stories someone named Nam Le should be writing and a few pages later we are plunged into the life and inner world of a 14-year-old assassin in a Columbian slum. From there we head to the New York apartment of a successful artist struggling to deal with his decrepitude, his memories and his regrets; and each successive change of scene and character is as starkly different.
We share with all these characters the fraught task of being human and mortal, but in most of these stories the circumstances of the lives we are introduced to are extraordinary and it is astonishing how perfectly Nam Le seems able to squeeze us into their skins, to feel their emotions, and allow us to see with their eyes: a dazzling work of the imagination but expressed in writing that is so wholly, heart-achingly believable that in reading we don’t just identify, we become them, and, when it’s time to move on, are almost ashamed to leave their skins behind. Let’s hope that most of us will never experience anything like the violent life of a young gang member in the slums of Medellin, or that of a child in Hiroshima in the last days of the Second World War, or in the hold of a leaking, storm-tossed boat crammed with a hundred refugees all in desperate search of a safe harbour and a new life.
There are threads in common running through and between these stories like the sinews and nerves that also connect them to us. The tensions between familial attachments, individual desires, and romantic love for example, produce recurrent themes. In each of the stories there are parents and children moving closer and tearing apart, lost and found, rejected and reeled back in again, like breathing out and breathing in, or like the endless motion of waves on the shore, swelling, breaking and withdrawing, every cycle a revelation.
Although at the end of each story we are left with the suggestion of an inevitability and a range of possible consequences, we see that this conclusion is penultimate at most, so that instead of finally reaching a destination, we hover, bid our hosts farewell, and prepare for the next set of coordinates. Like a turn on Google Earth swooping us from place to place, and to the next life in transit: to the impoverished barrio in Columbia; to the artist’s studio apartment in New York; to a school hall in a small coastal town in Australia; to Hiroshima in the days before the bomb; to a plane touching down in Teheran; and finally, returned as it were, to the storm tossed boat of the book’s title with its steadily dwindling human cargo.
Each story is separated only by a sigh, and a shallow rhythmic momentum builds to create a sense of purposeful drift. Never fully in control, we float, continually on the look out for a shore to land on. And perhaps this is the thing that most powerfully binds each story to the one before it and propels us on to the next: the perpetual theme of hope; hope that is simultaneously resilient and frail, hope that never falters even when hope is not nearly enough, hope that lasts for as long as we can stay afloat.
Nam Le will be a guest at this year’s Ubud Writers & Readers Festival, 7 – 11 October 2009.
Stephen Atkinson is an Australian freelance writer currently living in Ubud.
