The Boat, Nam Le

I really enjoyed reading The Boat. What I appreciated the most was the ability of Nam Le to include so much detail and description in each story. I felt that unlike the other short story collections we read this one really gave us a full background, character portrayals, and multiple plotlines. His use of description of the setting was so impeccable that without even telling where the story took place we would have been able to figure it out. His ability to intertwine individual aspects of the plot within each other really made each story interesting and fulfilling. For instance in Tehran Calling, Sarah’s relationship with Paul, paralleled by her relationship with Pavlon gave the story depth and made it more than just what is structured as one chapter in the book. Going back to what we said in class today about portraying violence and atrocity in literature and comparing The Pink Intuition’s use of blunt detail to Nam Le’s use of storytelling, I really feel as Nam Le’s technique was more effective because it hooked his reader into a web of drama, relationships, and serious problems that tapped on our emotions and made us somehow, relate it to our own lives, not necessarily because of the problems themselves as more worldly but because they are surrounded by emotion. In The Pink Institution the emotion that the characters felt was displayed in their actions but not necessarily through the words of the author which although had a powerful effect, did nothing for us since most of us do not attempt suicide, or take the same paths of actions the characters in the Pink Institution did. While emotions are universal, actions are individual.

Going back to the first story, I realized after the class discussion, that not only did his dad burn his story which signifies that he can’t turn experience into words, but he also keeps referring to the fact that he was mad at his dad because of what he didn’t know at the time but found out later. On page 28 he says, “If I had known then what I knew later, I wouldn’t have said the things I did.” I wonder if maybe this means he wrote a different novel and then realized this and then from there wrote The Boat? It would be interesting to read into that line.

I also noticed that Nam Le changed some things in each story but also kept the structure the same. For instance in Cartagena he took out all quotation marks and used Spanish language, keeping the words, grammar and sentence structure parallel with the lives of the characters. In Hiroshima father, mother, brother, etc. were all capitalized which is representative of the lives of the characters in the sense that their parents and family played a different role in the lives of people in Japan and earned more respect. In the story that takes place in Australia the dialect changed again. Words such as mate were substituted for friend and mum for mom. One thing I found that was common to all the stories however was that he jumped between past and present, in most cases without any real transition or warning. This was effective since he didn’t really have much space for transition, but I also thought it took away from some of each story since before I figured out the pattern in each individual story I was often confused. Another common aspect to each story was the lack of an ending. I also found this effective for the author's purposes but I personally didn’t like it since I was left with all these questions that had been answered would have made a bigger impact on me.