The Boat - Couverture rigide

Le, Nam

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 030726808X ISBN 13 : 9780307268082

Editeur : Alfred a Knopf Inc, 2008

Synopsis

Book by Le Nam

A propos du livre

Revue de presse :

“Remarkable . . . 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 will find a way to confront or disarm the situation. The opening story of this volume, ‘Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice,’ and its singular masterpiece, features a narrator who shares a name and certain biographical details with the author . . . The other tales in this book, however, circumnavigate the globe, demonstrating Mr. Le’s astonishing ability to channel the experiences of a multitude of characters, from a young child living in Hiroshima during World War II to a 14-year-old hit man in the barrios of Medellín to a high school jock in an Australian beach town. Mr. Le not only writes with an authority and poise rare even among longtime authors, but he also demonstrates an intuitive, gut-level ability to convey the psychological conflicts people experience when they find their own hopes and ambitions slamming up against familial expectations or the brute facts of history.
By far the most powerful, most fully realized story in this collection, ‘Love and Honor’ begins as a fairly conventional account of a young writer suffering from writer’s block and trying to cope with an unwanted visit from his father, who has flown in from Australia to see him. . . . As this story unfolds, it becomes a meditation not just on fathers and sons, but also on the burdens of history and the sense of guilt and responsibility that survivors often bequeath to their children. . . . [Le’s] sympathy for his characters and his ability to write with both lyricism and emotional urgency lend his portraits enormous visceral power. . . . In the two stories that bookend this collection, he conveys what it might be like to have the Vietnam War as an inescapable fact of daily life, infecting every relationship and warping the trajectory of one’s life. In ‘The Boat’ he does so directly with devastating results; in ‘Love and Honor’ he does so elliptically, creating a haunting marvel of a story that says as much about familial dreams and burdens as it does about the wages of history.”

–Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

“Not yet 30, [Nam Le] is already an extraordinarily accomplished and sophisticated writer. In [The Boat’s] opening story, he plays with the elusive boundaries between truth and fiction . . . [The Boat] offers strong evidence that the most effective way to convey the universal human qualities Faulkner admired in literature is, paradoxically, through the individual and the particular. . . . The range of characters is unusual, but what is truly remarkable is that the language and tone of each [story] is perfectly suited to the characters and setting . . . The stories are so different from one another it is hard to believe all seven are the work of a single author. What they all have in common is that each one portrays its characters in a crisis that reveals resources of courage and resilience even he or she was not aware of. All but one of the stories concern what is arguably the deepest, most complex and most poignant of human relationships: the bond between parent and child. . . . The most moving and unforgettable is ‘Halflead Bay’ . . . Rarely has one read such a sensitive and empathetic treatment of adolescent angst, all the more remarkable because the story’s main character is shy and inarticulate. . . . The story is especially memorable for its richly poetic Australian vernacular, a language Nam Le clearly feels in his bones. The future looks bright for Nam Le. As Faulkner observed, voices like his not only record the human condition but also help us endure and prevail.”

–Michael McGaha, San Francisco Chronicle

“Astounding . . . A refreshingly diverse and panoramic debut. [The Boat’s] seven stories are set in Iowa City, the slums of Colombia, Manhattan, coastal Australia, Hiroshima, Iran and the South China Sea, with characters as varied as a Japanese third-grader, an aging painter with hemorrhoids and an American woman visiting Iran for the first time. . . . ‘Cartagena,’ a gripping tale of adolescent friendship, crime and loyalty [would] in less capable hands . . . quickly devolve into cartoonish violence and two-dimensional stereotype, but Le’s masterful treatment results in a rich unveiling that renders the story more complex at every turn. The atmosphere is utterly authentic, the language spare and idiomatic. . . . What is most remarkable about [‘Meeting Elise’] is the way in which Le deftly juggles dialogue, memory and the physical sense of an aging man’s ailing body to create a continuous, seamless consciousness, wholly convincing throughout. The stories tend to establish a future event and conclude just before that event occurs. . . . This lends them a narrative propulsion while also placing the characters in a space in which they interact, collide, struggle to connect, fail or succeed. Le's characters tend to be people in transit, people who, for one reason or another, have come unmoored and find themselves among other unmoored people, all of them trying to find their way to safety and stability. He resists the urge to explain them away and instead inhabits them with the sort of visceral empathy that cannot be taught. . . . The finest story in the collection is ‘Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice,’ . . . a deeply moving story about a son and father attempting to come to terms with themselves, with each other and with the past. . . . In its complexity, in its range, in its depiction of a struggle to make sense of experience, [it] achieves the realm of Literature.”

–Antoine Wilson, Los Angeles Times Book Review

“A collection that takes the reader across the globe. From Iowa to Colombia to Australia and Iran, the characters in Le’s stories each shape the world around them. In each story, the protagonists create a new atmosphere. . . . ‘Love and Honor and Pity . . .’ is a thought-provoking introduction to the world of the author, and ‘Halflead Bay,’ a story that takes place in Le’s native Australia, is a very moving, brief coming-of-age tale. . . . While Le is a writer who seems to be interested in the issues of the world, he is also a writer interested in the young. . . . Le does not downplay the lives of his children as fiction often does when portraying younger characters but presents them with a seriousness and intelligence that is refreshing. . . . The Boat is an impressive debut from a writer with a lot more to give. A writer to be remembered.”

–Marion Frisby, The Denver Post

“Powerful . . . Lyrical . . . Devastating . . . A harsh and masterful effort, each tale a clean shot through the heart, the aim true. In seven stories covering six continents and an ocean, Le delivers a powerful and assured vision that offers a clear look at his impressive talents. The range is ambitious. Le adopts the persona of a young drug assassin in Cartagena, an aging New York painter, an American woman visiting a radical friend in Tehran. Steered by a less-certain voice, readers might suffer whiplash. But Le never loses his way. In the searing first story, ‘Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice,’ he nails with bitter precision the tension between a Vietnam-born former lawyer trying to meet a deadline at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and his father . . . Le sketches the life of the immigrant writer son with spare, sure strokes. . . . His kaleidoscopic world view is on display throughout the stories, which seamlessly blend cultural traditions, accents and landscapes that run from lush to barren. The collection works in part because Le’s confidence as a storyteller is the solid base on which the structure rests. Le doesn’t turn away from difficult moments; he stares right at them. There’s a purpose to the tough scenes that builds the reader’s trust. Le is the sort of writer who taps directly into the vein of desperation and offers no shelter. He’s not for the faint of heart, but the reward for soldiering on in the toughness of his world is the welcome recognition of a voice clear and brave.”

–Amy Driscoll, The Miami Herald

“Captivating . . . An uncannily mature debut [that] distills time, experience . . . There’s a streak of the naturalist in Nam Le that looks back to such writers as Emile Zola, Stephen Crane and Theodore Dreiser. Like them, he sees individual suffering as intimately tied to large social forces. . . . Though many of the stories have a socially charged dimension, they aren’t concerned in any specific way with issues or social problems, except insofar as they affect the lives of his characters. Le concentrates how they experience our time and the places they inhabit. . . . [‘Love and Honor . . .’] gives multifaceted life to the story of a father, deeply enmeshed in his ethnic history, and a son, who is ambivalent about his relationship to it. . . . The way ‘Love and Honor’ ends, conveyed in beautifully restrained poetic language, is heartrending. Indeed, all of these stories break your heart in different ways, each as memorably as the others. . . . ‘The Boat,’ which concludes the book, is the toughest to read. Not because it isn’t wonderfully written. Rather, because it focuses so vividly on the physical and psychological trials of a small group of Vietnamese refugees afloat...

Extrait :

Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice

My father arrived on a rainy morning. I was dreaming about a poem, the dull thluck thluck of a typewriter's keys punching out the letters. It was a good poem--perhaps the best I'd ever written. When I woke up, he was standing outside my bedroom door, smiling ambiguously. He wore black trousers and a wet, wrinkled parachute jacket that looked like it had just been pulled out of a washing machine. Framed by the bedroom doorway, he appeared even smaller, gaunter, than I remembered. Still groggy with dream, I lifted my face toward the alarm clock.
"What time is it?"

"Hello, Son," he said in Vietnamese. "I knocked for a long time. Then the door just opened."

The fields are glass, I thought. Then tum-ti-ti, a dactyl, end line, then the words excuse and alloy in the line after. Come on, I thought.

"It's raining heavily," he said.

I frowned. The clock read 11:44. "I thought you weren't coming until this afternoon." It felt strange, after all this time, to be speaking Vietnamese again.

"They changed my flight in Los Angeles."

"Why didn't you ring?"

"I tried," he said equably. "No answer."

I twisted over the side of the bed and cracked open the window. The sound of rain filled the room--rain fell on the streets, on the roofs, on the tin shed across the parking lot like the distant detonations of firecrackers. Everything smelled of wet leaves.

"I turn the ringer off when I sleep," I said. "Sorry."

He continued smiling at me, significantly, as if waiting for an announcement.

"I was dreaming."

He used to wake me, when I was young, by standing over me and smacking my cheeks lightly. I hated it--the wetness, the sourness of his hands.

"Come on," he said, picking up a large Adidas duffel and a rolled bundle that looked like a sleeping bag. 'A day lived, a sea of knowledge earned." He had a habit of speaking in Vietnamese proverbs. I had long since learned to ignore it.

I threw on a T-shirt and stretched my neck in front of the lone window. Through the rain, the sky was as gray and striated as graphite. The fields are glass . . . Like a shape in smoke, the poem blurred, then dissolved into this new, cold, strange reality: a windblown, rain-strafed parking lot; a dark room almost entirely taken up by my bed; the small body of my father dripping water onto hardwood floors.

I went to him, my legs goose-pimpled underneath my pajamas. He watched with pleasant indifference as my hand reached for his, shook it, then relieved his other hand of the bags. "You must be exhausted," I said.

He had flown from Sydney, Australia. Thirty-three hours all up--transiting in Auckland, Los Angeles, and Denver--before touching down in Iowa. I hadn't seen him in three years.

"You'll sleep in my room."

"Very fancy," he said, as he led me through my own apartment. "You even have a piano." He gave me an almost rueful smile. "I knew you'd never really quit." Something moved behind his face and I found myself back on a heightened stool with my fingers chasing the metronome, ahead and behind, trying to shut out the tutor's repeated sighing, his heavy brass ruler. I realized I was massaging my knuckles. My father patted the futon in my living room. "I'll sleep here."
'You'll sleep in my room, Ba." I watched him warily as he surveyed our surroundings, messy with books, papers, dirty plates, teacups, clothes--I'd intended to tidy up before going to the airport. "I work in this room anyway, and I work at night." As he moved into the kitchen, I grabbed the three-quarters-full bottle of Johnnie Walker from the second shelf of my bookcase and stashed it under the desk. I looked around. The desktop was gritty with cigarette ash. I threw some magazines over the roughest spots, then flipped one of them over because its cover bore a picture of Chairman Mao. I quickly gathered up the cigarette packs and sleeping pills and incense burners and dumped them all on a high shelf, behind my Kafka Vintage Classics.
At the kitchen swing door I remembered the photo of Linda beside the printer. Her glamour shot, I called it: hair windswept and eyes squinty, smiling at something out of frame. One of her ex-boyfriends had taken it at Lake MacBride. She looked happy. I snatched it and turned it facedown, covering it with scrap paper. As I walked into the kitchen I thought, for a moment, that I'd left the fire escape open. I could hear rainwater gushing along gutters, down through the pipes. Then I saw my father at the sink, sleeves rolled up, sponge in hand, washing the month-old crusted mound of dishes. The smell was awful. "Ba," I frowned, "you don't need to do that."

His hands, hard and leathery, moved deftly in the sink.

"Ba," I said, halfheartedly.

"I'm almost finished." He looked up and smiled. 'Have you eaten? Do you want me to make some lunch?"

"Thoi," I said, suddenly irritated. "You're exhausted. I'll go out and get us something."

I went back through the living room into my bedroom, picking up clothes and rubbish along the way.

"You don't have to worry about me," he called out. "You just do what you always do."
The truth was, he'd come at the worst possible time. I was in my last year at the Iowa Writers' Workshop; it was late November, and my final story for the semester was due in three days. I had a backlog of papers to grade and a heap of fellowship and job applications to draft and submit. It was no wonder I was drinking so much.

I'd told Linda only the previous night that he was coming. We were at her place. Her body was slippery with sweat and hard to hold. Her body smelled of her clothes. She turned me over, my face kissing the bedsheets, and then she was chopping my back with the edges of her hands. Higher. Out a bit more. She had trouble keeping a steady rhythm. "Softer," I told her. Moments later, I started laughing.

"What?"

The sheets were damp beneath my pressed face.

"What?"

"Softer," I said, "not slower."

She slapped my back with the meat of her palms, hard--once, twice. I couldn't stop laughing. I squirmed over and caught her by the wrists. Hunched forward, she was blushing and beautiful. Her hair fell over her face; beneath its ash-blond hem all I could see were her open lips. She pressed down, into me, her shoulders kinking the long, lean curve from the back of her neck to the small of her back. "Stop it!" her lips said. She wrested her hands free. Her fingers beneath my waistband, violent, the scratch of her nails down my thighs, knees, ankles. I pointed my foot like a ballet dancer.

Afterward, I told her my father didn't know about her. She said nothing. "We just don't talk about that kind of stuff," I explained. She looked like an actress who looked like my girlfriend. Staring at her face made me tired. I'd begun to feel this way more often around her. "He's only here for three days." Somewhere out of sight, a group of college boys hooted and yelled.

"I thought you didn't talk to him at all."

"He's my father."

"What's he want?"

I rolled toward her, onto my elbow. I tried to remember how much I'd told her about him. We'd been lying on the bed, the wind loud in the room--I remember that--and we were both tipsy. Ours could have been any two voices in the darkness. "It's only three days," I said.

The look on her face was strange, shut down. She considered me a long time. Then she got up and pulled on her clothes. "Just make sure you get your story done," she said.
I drank before I came here too. I drank when I was a student at university, and then when I was a lawyer--in my previous life, as they say. There was a subterranean bar in a hotel next to my work, and every night I would wander down and slump on a barstool and pretend I didn't want the bartender to make small talk. He was only a bit older than me, and I came to envy his ease, his confidence that any given situation was merely temporary. I left exorbitant tips. After a while I was treated to battered shrimps and shepherd's pies on the house. My parents had already split by then, my father moving to Sydney, my mother into a government flat.

That's all I've ever done, traffic in words. Sometimes I still think about word counts the way a general must think about casualties. I'd been in Iowa more than a year--days passed in weeks, then months, more than a year of days--and I'd written only three and a half stories. About seventeen thousand words. When I was working at the law firm, I would have written that many words in a couple of weeks. And they would have been useful to someone.

Deadlines came, exhausting, and I forced myself up to meet them. Then, in the great spans of time between, I fell back to my vacant screen and my slowly sludging mind. I tried everything--writing in longhand, writing in my bed, in my bathtub. As this last deadline approached, I remembered a friend claiming he'd broken his writer's block by switching to a typewriter. You're free to write, he told me, once you know you can't delete what you've written. I bought an electric Smith Corona at an antique shop. It buzzed like a tropical aquarium when I plugged it in. It looked good on my desk. For inspiration, I read absurdly formal Victorian poetry and drank Scotch neat. How hard could it be? Things happened in this world all the time. All I had to do was record them. In the sky, two swarms of swallows converged, pulled apart, interwove again like veils drifting at crosscur...

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Alfred a Knopf Inc
• Date d'édition: 2008
• ISBN 10: 030726808X
• ISBN 13: 9780307268082
• Reliure: Relié
• Numéro d'édition: 1
• Nombre de pages: 272