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'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.)
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
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Dedication: To: Ta Thi Xuan Le, my mother, Le Huu Phuc, my father and Truong and Victor, my brothers.
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Epigraph: Importunate along the dark/ Horizon of immediacies/ The flares of desperation rise. W. H. Auden.
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Epigraph: How strange that when the summons came I always felt good. Frank Conroy.
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Included in the New York Times Book Review 100 Notable Books List for 2008.
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Noted briefly in the 'Paperback Row' column, New York Times Book Review, 27 September 2009.
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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
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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
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Love and Honour and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice,
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.)
- Cartagena, single work short story (p. 31-75)
- Meeting Elise, single work short story (p. 76-105)
- Halflead Bay, single work short story (p. 106-185)
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Hiroshima,
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.
- Tehran Calling, single work short story (p. 204-263)
- The Boat, single work short story (p. 264-313)
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Other Formats
- Large print.
Works about this Work
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On the Literary History of Selling Out : Craft, Identity, and Commercial Recognition
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)
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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"
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
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)
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Children on the Boat : the Recuperative Work of Postmemory in Short Fiction of the Vietnamese Diaspora
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)
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Literature, Literary Ethics, and the Global Contexts of Australian Literature : Teaching Nam Le’s The Boat
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)
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Editor's Picks
2008
single work
review
— Appears in: Bookseller + Publisher Magazine , April/May vol. 87 no. 8 2008; (p. 32)
— Review of The Boat 2008 selected work short story -
A World of Stories from a Son of Vietnam
2008
single work
review
— Appears in: The New York Times , 13 May 2008; (p. 1)
— Review of The Boat 2008 selected work short storyKakutani 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.'
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Outside Ethnicity
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 2008 selected work short storyKunzru 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.'
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First-Time Narrative a Rare Voice
2008
single work
review
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 7-8 June 2008; (p. 14-15)
— Review of The Boat 2008 selected work short story -
No Need for Lesbian Vampires
2008
single work
review
— Appears in: The Age , 14 June 2008; (p. 31)
— Review of The Boat 2008 selected work short story -
Stories to Explore Somone Else's Skin
2008
single work
column
— Appears in: The New York Times , 14 May 2008; (p. 1) -
When the Boat Comes In
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
2008
single work
column
— Appears in: The Advertiser , 26 July 2008; (p. 15) -
On Nam Le
2008
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Heat , no. 17 (New Series) 2008; (p. 63-77) -
Asian Voices Add to the Great Chorus
2008
single work
criticism
— Appears in: The Canberra Times , 6 September 2008; (p. 4-5)
Awards
- 2010 joint winner PEN/Malamud Award Joint winner with US author Edward P. Jones.
- 2010 winner Kathleen Mitchell Literary Award
- 2009 winner New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards — UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing
- 2009 winner Prime Minister's Literary Awards — Fiction
- 2009 shortlisted Australian Booksellers Association Awards — BookPeople Book of the Year
- Victoria,
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cColombia,cSouth America, Americas,
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New York (City),
New York (State),
cUnited States of America (USA),cAmericas,
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Hiroshima,
Honshu,
cJapan,cEast Asia, South and East Asia, Asia,
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Iowa,
cUnited States of America (USA),cAmericas,