2008 Woodie Awards
A sense of being home everywhere
Tara Atkinson Gunyon - The Daily Iowan
Issue date: 6/10/08 Section: Arts/mp3s
The Boat is not just the title of Nam Le's book, it is also an excellent description of Nam Le himself.
(See so tonight, when he will read at Prairie Lights Books, 15 S. Dubuque St. at 7 p.m.)
The Boat, his first book, is a collection of seven short stories, each narrated from a place, a time, and a point of view wildly different from that of the story preceding, and throughout our journey, Le, its intrepid author, guides us safely in and out of the turbulent waters that are the stories themselves.
One story is of a teenage assassin in the slums of Colombia, another of a young Vietnamese refugee making a terrifying 12-day journey to freedom, another of a graduate student in the Iowa Writer's Workshop.
The title of the first story, "Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice," is comically suggestive of the sort of emotional and thematic kitchen sink that characterizes the collection. The stories in The Boat are full, almost to bursting, and with an exactness that was the product of years of research on Le's part.
"I feel intuitively it's my responsibility to myself and the material I'm working with that when it's hard, I don't let myself off the hook," he said.
That story, the first in the book, with its narrator coincidentally named Nam Le, who is also coincidentally a Writers' Workshop student at the UI, which the real Nam Le was from 2004-06, takes head on the idea of autobiography often exploited in first books.
"By making some nods toward autobiography in something clearly marked as fiction," he said. "I wanted to show up the inherent impurity of the story, to disassociate authority from presumed authenticity."
Though his first book eschews the sometimes true cliché that first books are typically autobiographical, parallels between the book and its author remain.
Le admits to being a wanderlust, something that it's easy to see reflected in the many places of his stories.
(See so tonight, when he will read at Prairie Lights Books, 15 S. Dubuque St. at 7 p.m.)
The Boat, his first book, is a collection of seven short stories, each narrated from a place, a time, and a point of view wildly different from that of the story preceding, and throughout our journey, Le, its intrepid author, guides us safely in and out of the turbulent waters that are the stories themselves.
One story is of a teenage assassin in the slums of Colombia, another of a young Vietnamese refugee making a terrifying 12-day journey to freedom, another of a graduate student in the Iowa Writer's Workshop.
The title of the first story, "Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice," is comically suggestive of the sort of emotional and thematic kitchen sink that characterizes the collection. The stories in The Boat are full, almost to bursting, and with an exactness that was the product of years of research on Le's part.
"I feel intuitively it's my responsibility to myself and the material I'm working with that when it's hard, I don't let myself off the hook," he said.
That story, the first in the book, with its narrator coincidentally named Nam Le, who is also coincidentally a Writers' Workshop student at the UI, which the real Nam Le was from 2004-06, takes head on the idea of autobiography often exploited in first books.
"By making some nods toward autobiography in something clearly marked as fiction," he said. "I wanted to show up the inherent impurity of the story, to disassociate authority from presumed authenticity."
Though his first book eschews the sometimes true cliché that first books are typically autobiographical, parallels between the book and its author remain.
Le admits to being a wanderlust, something that it's easy to see reflected in the many places of his stories.
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