This is supposed to be a comment under 'The Boat, Nam Le' by Alyse Borkan

For some reason, there is a glitch, and the system does not allow me to post under Alyse's opening post. Here is my comment:

The author does leave a lot of unanswered questions, which I believe creates a much more powerful impact and allows the readers to utilize the creativity. I felt the only story that had a relatively clear ending was ‘Cartagena’. ‘Love and Honor...’ too had a decent ending as the reader has to verify that the father burnt the story (or maybe through it into the river). But most of the other stories, especially ‘Meeting Elise’, ‘Hiroshima’, and ‘Tehran Calling’, leave the story without a proper ending, which would tie up all the loose strings throughout the text. Though, I believe, this is the style of contemporary literature to not provide the readers with everything, there is no ‘spoon feeding’ anymore, like it might have been in the good old days of fictional stories such as Sherlock Holmes, where you would be provided with each and every detail, and then there would be an answer to all the mysteries in the story. But in reality, it never works that way, and I believe both Nam Le and much of contemporary literature reflect this.