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Courtesy the publisher.
y separately published work icon The Boat selected work   short story  
Issue Details: First known date: 2008... 2008 The Boat
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'In the magnificent opening story, "Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice," a young writer is urged by his friends to mine his father's experiences in Vietnam - and what seems at first a satire on turning one's life into literary commerce becomes a transcendent exploration of homeland, and the ties between father and son. "Cartagena" provides a visceral glimpse of life in Colombia as it enters the mind of a fourteen-year-old hit man facing the ultimate test. In "Meeting Elise" an ageing New York painter mourns his body's decline as he prepares to meet his daughter on the eve of her Carnegie Hall debut. And with graceful symmetry, the final, title story returns to Vietnam, to a fishing trawler crowded with refugees where a young woman's bond with a mother and her small son forces both women to a shattering decision.' (From the author's website.)

Exhibitions

Reading Australia

Reading Australia

This work has Reading Australia teaching resources.

Unit Suitable For

AC: Years 10–12 (NSW Stages 5–6). However, with some adaptation it could also be used for highly proficient Year 9 students seeking extension.

Themes

a writer's obligation to memory, acceptance, ageing, asylum seekers, coming of age, cultural awareness, dealing with the past, ethnicity, family, fate, friendship, historical events, hope, identity, loyalty, mortality, reconciliation, refugees, resilience, sacrifice

General Capabilities

Critical and creative thinking, Intercultural understanding, Literacy

Cross-curriculum Priorities

Asia and Australia's engagement with Asia

Notes

  • Dedication: To: Ta Thi Xuan Le, my mother, Le Huu Phuc, my father and Truong and Victor, my brothers.
  • Epigraph: Importunate along the dark/ Horizon of immediacies/ The flares of desperation rise. W. H. Auden.
  • Epigraph: How strange that when the summons came I always felt good. Frank Conroy.
  • Included in the New York Times Book Review 100 Notable Books List for 2008.
  • Noted briefly in the 'Paperback Row' column, New York Times Book Review, 27 September 2009.
  • In 2011, first-year students at Melbourne University were able to purchase a subsidised copy of The Boat as part of the university's summer reading project. The project aimed to engage students in university life.

Affiliation Notes

  • This work is affiliated with the AustLit subset Asian-Australian Children's Literature and Publishing because it has been recommended as a resource for Asia Literacy for secondary students by the Department of Education and Early Childhood Development, Victoria.

Contents

* Contents derived from the Camberwell, Camberwell - Kew area, Melbourne - Inner South, Melbourne, Victoria,:Hamish Hamilton , 2008 version. Please note that other versions/publications may contain different contents. See the Publication Details.
Love and Honour and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice, Nam Le , single work short story

'A young Vietnamese-Australian named Nam, in his final year at the famed Iowa Writers' Workshop, is trying to find his voice on the page. When his father, a man with a painful past, comes to visit, Nam's writing and sense of self are both deeply changed.

'Love and Honour and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice is a deeply moving story of identity, family and the wellsprings of creativity, from Nam Le's multi-award-winning collection The Boat.' (From the publisher's website, 2012 Penguin publication.)

(p. 1-30)
Cartagena, Nam Le , single work short story (p. 31-75)
Meeting Elise, Nam Le , Nam Le , single work short story (p. 76-105)
Halflead Bay, Nam Le , single work short story (p. 106-185)
Hiroshima, Nam Le , single work short story

A young girl in war-time Hiroshima tries to repress her loneliness and longing for her family by clinging to nationalist propaganda.

(p. 186-203)
Tehran Calling, Nam Le , single work short story (p. 204-263)
The Boat, Nam Le , single work short story (p. 264-313)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

    • Camberwell, Camberwell - Kew area, Melbourne - Inner South, Melbourne, Victoria,: Hamish Hamilton , 2008 .
      image of person or book cover 7206324726176176512.jpg
      This image has been sourced from author's website
      Extent: 315p.
      ISBN: 9780241015414 (pbk.)
    • New York (City), New York (State),
      c
      United States of America (USA),
      c
      Americas,
      :
      Knopf ,
      2008 .
      image of person or book cover 7609040781757865329.jpg
      This image has been sourced from online.
      Extent: 272p.
      Edition info: 1st ed.
      ISBN: 9780307268082, 9780307388193
    • Toronto, Ontario,
      c
      Canada,
      c
      Americas,
      :
      Anchor Canada ,
      2009 .
      image of person or book cover 3489682500898196096.jpg
      This image has been sourced from online.
      Extent: 288p.
      ISBN: 9780385665575
    • c
      United Kingdom (UK),
      c
      Western Europe, Europe,
      :
      Canongate ,
      2009 .
      image of person or book cover 5881147834096853561.jpg
      This image has been sourced from online.
      Extent: 288pp.p.
      ISBN: 9781847671615
    • c
      Canada,
      c
      Americas,
      :
      c
      United States of America (USA),
      c
      Americas,
      :
      Vintage ,
      2009 .
      image of person or book cover 1431799237636401887.jpg
      This image has been sourced from online.
      Extent: 288pp.p.
      ISBN: 9780307388193
    • Melbourne, Victoria,: Penguin , 2013 .
      image of person or book cover 1895914335533780188.jpg
      This image has been sourced from online.
      Extent: 336p.
      Note/s:
      • Published: 20/11/2013
      ISBN: 9780143569701
Alternative title: Im Boot: Erzählungen
Language: German
    • c
      Germany,
      c
      Western Europe, Europe,
      :
      Ullstein Buchverlage ,
      2008 .
      image of person or book cover 5636456980196899825.jpg
      This image has been sourced from online.
      Extent: 336pp.p.
      ISBN: 3546004426, 9783546004428

Other Formats

Works about this Work

On the Literary History of Selling Out : Craft, Identity, and Commercial Recognition Ian Afflerbach , 2022 single work criticism
— Appears in: PMLA , March vol. 137 no. 2 2022; (p. 230-245)
'This essay identifies “selling out” as an enduring yet evolving concern in anglophone literary history, from the late nineteenth century's divided literary field to the “program era” to the increasingly global circuits of contemporary literary commerce. It begins with Henry James, showing how his canonical statements on modern narrative form emerged from commercial negotiations—an economic prehistory of “craft.” Selling out becomes a salient concern as intellectuals come to see commercial success as antithetical to modern art. This cultural anxiety changes, however, once creative writing programs begin systematically reconciling craft and commerce. Turning to Nam Le's celebrated short story collection The Boat, the second section shows how selling out came to entail a fear that minority writers might betray group solidarity through reductive or essentialist portrayals of identity. Finally, the essay's third section closes by situating Le within a global market for postcolonial fiction and its attendant concerns over commodifying exoticism.' (Publication abstract)
 
Graphic Experiences of Immigration, Migration, and Diaspora: Shaun Tan's The Arrival and Matt Huynh's Interactive Graphic Adaptation of Nam Le's "The Boat" Alison Halsall , 2021 single work criticism
— Appears in: Graphic Embodiments : Perspectives on Health and Embodiment in Graphic Narratives 2021; (p. 61-74)
Stories for Hyperlinked Times : The Short Story Cycle and Rebekah Clarkson’s Barking Dogs Amelia Walker , 2019 single work column
— Appears in: The Conversation , 9 October 2019;

'We live hyperlinked lives, expected to be switched on and logged in 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Time is a dwindling resource, multitasking is our default setting. We’re constantly reading: online articles, emails, social media posts. But for many of us, this dip-in, dip-out reading feels dissatisfying. We crave deeper engagement.' (Introduction)

Children on the Boat : the Recuperative Work of Postmemory in Short Fiction of the Vietnamese Diaspora Alexandra Kurmann , 2018 single work criticism
— Appears in: Comparative Literature , June vol. 70 no. 2 2018; (p. 218-234)

'In this article we argue that a cohort of French, Canadian, and Australian authors of Vietnamese descent are adapting postmemory narratives to fit the purposes of the 1.5 generation. Linda Lê, Kim Thúy, and Nam Le each displace the Vietnam War to reimagine in its stead, for the first time in Vietnamese diasporic writing, the trauma of the refugee boat journey. Breaking the silence of parents wont to forget, in short fiction they narrativize shared accounts of flight by sea that have until this time remained the domain of autobiography and memoir. Through a process of spectral recuperation, these children of survivors employ the figure of the child to tell the event of their own refugee becoming. Former child refugees recently come of writerly age across a multilingual global diaspora are thus reappropriating an in-between generation’s collective postmemory to form what we call the sub-genre of “the boat narrative.”'  (Publication abstract)

Literature, Literary Ethics, and the Global Contexts of Australian Literature : Teaching Nam Le’s The Boat Brigitta Olubas , 2016 single work criticism
— Appears in: Teaching Australian and New Zealand Literature 2016; (p. 190-198)

‘This essay takes up the question of literary ethics as a mode of pedagogy and considers the way the contexts of writing and reading bear on the larger and historical and conceptual resonances of literary texts. Nam Le's collection of short stories, The Boat (2008), is an exemplary Australian text that speaks to its global and Asian-Pacific contexts, prompting students to engage with their contemporary world first through specific locations and then through the paradigm of what we call "the literary" or "literature," by which I mean an appreciation of the ways that literature and literary reading persist today despite the extraordinary shifts that we have witnessed in media and cultural literacy. I focus on the opening story of the collection, "Love and Honour and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice," because it explicitly addresses the question of literary ethics - that is, what writing and reading mean in the early twenty-first century—first through the protagonist,  a young Vietnamese Australian writer who shares his name with the author, and second through his experience of hearing and reworking a first-person story of trauma told to him by his father. That "Love and Honour" is rich with intertextual associations—notably with the writing of James Joyce, William Faulkner, and Kurt Vonnegut — gives students the opportunity to connect and reconnect with well-known works and to extend their sense of the terrain of the literary.’ (Introduction)

Editor's Picks Matthia Dempsey , 2008 single work review
— Appears in: Bookseller + Publisher Magazine , April/May vol. 87 no. 8 2008; (p. 32)

— Review of The Boat Nam Le , 2008 selected work short story
A World of Stories from a Son of Vietnam Michiko Kakutani , 2008 single work review
— Appears in: The New York Times , 13 May 2008; (p. 1)

— Review of The Boat Nam Le , 2008 selected work short story

Kakutani asserts that the opening story, 'like many in The Boat, catches people in moments of extremis, confronted by death or loss or terror (or all three) and forced to grapple at the most fundamental level with who they are and what they want or believe. Whether it’s the prospect of dying at sea or being shot by a drug kingpin or losing family members in a war, Nam Le’s people are individuals trapped in the crosshairs of fate, forced to choose whether they will react like deer caught in the headlights, or whether they will find a way to confront or disarm the situation.'

Outside Ethnicity Hari Kunzru , 2008 single work review
— Appears in: The New York Times Book Review , 8 June vol. 113 no. 23 2008; (p. 8)

— Review of The Boat Nam Le , 2008 selected work short story

Kunzru suggests in this review that 'The Boat is transparently a product of the increasingly formalized milieu in which American writers train — a well-wrought collection that, in its acute self-consciousness, trails a telltale whiff of 'the industry' that is its initial concern, of the 'heap of fellowship and job applications' the fictional Le needs 'to draft and submit' when he’s interrupted by his father. 'Ethnic lit' is unhappily what emerges when identity politics head into the marketing meeting [...]. Le is starting to grapple with the subtleties of authenticity, but one comes away feeling that it’s not really his subject, that he has a future as a very different kind of writer.'

First-Time Narrative a Rare Voice Tim Johnston , 2008 single work review
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 7-8 June 2008; (p. 14-15)

— Review of The Boat Nam Le , 2008 selected work short story
No Need for Lesbian Vampires James Ley , 2008 single work review
— Appears in: The Age , 14 June 2008; (p. 31)

— Review of The Boat Nam Le , 2008 selected work short story
Stories to Explore Somone Else's Skin Patrick Cohen , 2008 single work column
— Appears in: The New York Times , 14 May 2008; (p. 1)
When the Boat Comes In Michael Williams , 2008 single work column
— Appears in: The Age , 30 May 2008; (p. 24-25) The Sydney Morning Herald , 21-22 June 2008; (p. 28-29)
Short and Sweet Michael Harry , 2008 single work column
— Appears in: The Advertiser , 26 July 2008; (p. 15)
On Nam Le Peter Craven , 2008 single work criticism
— Appears in: Heat , no. 17 (New Series) 2008; (p. 63-77)
Asian Voices Add to the Great Chorus James Massola , 2008 single work criticism
— Appears in: The Canberra Times , 6 September 2008; (p. 4-5)
Last amended 13 Feb 2020 09:58:19
Settings:
  • Victoria,
  • c
    Colombia,
    c
    South America, Americas,
  • New York (City), New York (State),
    c
    United States of America (USA),
    c
    Americas,
  • Hiroshima, Honshu,
    c
    Japan,
    c
    East Asia, South and East Asia, Asia,
  • Iowa,
    c
    United States of America (USA),
    c
    Americas,
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