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1 out of 5
by
Emily
from
Brooklyn, NY | Jun 12, 2008
*sigh* Where do I even begin with what went wrong with this book. It started off so well. Certain scenes are so well described that I was really invested as a reader. However, I hate the way he ends each story... or rather, doesn't.
The first story felt like a good introduction chapter to a novel, except it's not a novel it was just a short story on its own. In turn it made the story have a horrible ending with a quick sum-up of what the character understood from the events in a few sentences.
It's an interesting book because it asks the question of whether or not anybody can write a story about a time, place, culture, language, etc that is not their own. I think it's possible because he does it decently in two/three of the stories. However, the rest were crap. I didn't believe them. They lacked a certain insight of someone who has lived that life or lived in that place or understood that culture. "Write what you know" should be plastered across his computer screen or above his typewriter. The stories were like the Hollywood version of certain stories. (No wonder certain critics were giving such high praise of it.) These stories were stories that were clearly imagined about other places and other times while the author rests comfortably in a pampered lifestyle thousands of miles from the actual locations.
8 people found this review helpful
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4 out of 5
by
Thomas
from
Green Isle, MN | Dec 27, 2008
"Faulkner, you know," my friend said over the squeals, "he said we should write the old verities. Love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice."
This quote is planted square in the middle of Nam Le's opening story, a metafictional conceit that allows the author to address the reader directly about how ethnicity and the immigrant experience can both confer a special status on an author while also becoming a crutch, hobbling his imagination.
That's precisely what I admire so much about this collection. Nam Le shows an impressive reach in the range of these stories. The most successful--the opening story, "Halfhead Bay", and "Meeting Elise" are grounded by sympathetic characters and some sizzling prose. The least successful don't fail because Nam Le wasn't "writing about what he knows" as some other reviews on this site have indicated. They fall flat from an overexposure to one too many writing workshops. Fearing melodrama, Le strips any emotional arc from stories like "Hiroshima" or "Tehran Calling." Characters are mired in their own ennui. Here the preachings of a literary culture that mistrusts redemption and epiphany and grace lead to stories that fail to move.
Such blemishes in an otherwise stirring collection are just fine with this reader. "Write what you know" is one of the most wearisome cliches of the workshop. I'm glad that Le has chosen instead to reach for the Other, while still daring to explore his own complex heritage. The result makes for a rich stew of stories overall, one that introduces a writer who shows great promise.
5 people found this review helpful
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3 out of 5
by
Mike
from
Saint Paul, MN | Oct 22, 2008
Okay -- "Halflead Bay" is dazzling, a 5-star story stretched some 50 pages (novellette? novella?) and I wish it had been more. I found myself immersed in the local, its own language and rhythms, the social and familial structures and struggles revealed with a confident, understated narrative structure. And writing that without razzle-dazzle dazed me, like a throwaway observation of trucks "ripping skins of water" off the roadway.
I enjoyed the last two stories, as well, yet found the other four stories merely okay, and--can we talk?--a bit aggravating. There's a kind of story that relies on literary ventriloquism, quickly sketching with occasional nuggets of another language and carefully-researched scenic and/or historical details. E.g., write a story about a kid in Vichy France: "The gendarmes bicycled past the house, so we hid the menorah." Wait--even better -- London in the Blitz!: "The bobbies tapped their batons on our window, scowling in and pointing to the sky, reminding us to pull the shades, as the jerries could show up at any time." Le is way, way better than this.... even as a story about Hiroshima could, if you were feeling ungenerous, fall all too squarely into this camp.
But unlike my ludicrous examples, Le is good at the ventriloquism; what bothered me about a few of these stories was that they seemed too literary, ornately and precisely "real" in exact inverse proportion to how they moved and engaged me. That's unfair -- even the worst ("Hiroshima") was okay, and the others I'm complaining about were fine, if unexceptional. (Having just read Zadie Smith's critique of a certain kind of literary realism I'm probably seeing evidence of her compelling complaints more than I would otherwise...) And, see above: at least one is a classic, and a couple others quite good. But when the narrative structure in the first three stories, even 'though ranging from workshop Iowa to barrio Columbia to Philip-Roth's aging-reprobate New York, is exactly the same present-past-present-past-presentclimaxsmallresolution, I get wary of trumpeting the range, too caught up in the template.
Still, recommended--you owe it to yourself to see where this guy is now, and did I say to read "Halflead Bay"? Read "Halflead Bay".
3 people found this review helpful
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3 out of 5
by
Stephanie
from
Singapore, 00, Singapore | Dec 20, 2008
THE first story in this debut collection by Australian writer Nam Le, 29, has the wonderfully bombastic title Love And Honor And Pity And Pride And Compassion And Sacrifice. A catalogue of the "old verities" Faulkner urged writers to write about, it suggests that all storytelling should go back to some fundamental, universal truth about the human condition.
This search for the fundamental takes centrestage in a story that also serves a dual purpose as the introduction this collection by Le, the fiction editor of the Harvard Review.
An apparently somewhat-autobiographical story -- the narrator is a Vietnamese-Australian writer named Nam who is at the Iowa Writer's Workshop -- it opens with the narrator being, three days before his final story of the semester is due, devoid of inspiration.
In a dig at the expectations readers -- particularly American readers -- have about stories written by non- white or "ethnic" writers, a friend of his alter-ego helpfully comments: "How can you have writer's block? Just write a story about Vietnam."
This stereotype of the immigrant writer being feted more for his or her exotic background than for writing skill -- as another friend hilariously puts it "You can't tell if the language is spare beause the author intended it that way, or because he didn't have the vocab" -- is one his fictional alter ego has no interest in perpetuating.
However, when his father visits from Australia and stirs up memories the writer has of hearing about the infamous My Lai massacre, which his father survived, he decides out of desperatin to start a story with the self-mocking working title “Ethnic Story.”
But although we do learn about his father's horrific experiences in snatches, ultimately this first story explores how a father-and-son relationship is shaped by those very verities Faulkner spoke of, in its own uniquely complex and savage way.
Similarly, in the stories that follow, characters find themselves teetering on the edge of potential catastrophe, and in this limbo are forced to confront their relationships with those around them. Meanwhile, the settings of these stories is best described by the same friend from the first story: “You could totally exploit the Vietnamese thing. But instead, you choose to write about lesbian vampires and Colombian assassins and Hiroshima orphans — and New York painters with hemorrhoids."
Indeed, the collection contains all these elements (except, a litle disappointingly, the lesbian vampires). The seven stories in this book all take place in vastly different worlds, going from an Iowa university town to the slums of Colombia, artistic New York, coastal Australia, World War II Japan, Islamic Iran and, finally, a boat of Vietnamese refugees (who share their ethnicity with the author, yet patently inhabit a different world).
All this travelling outside of the writer's own experience does smack a bit of a precocious creative writing student showing off his virtuosity. For example, the weakest story, Hiroshima, reads like a fastidiously-compiled list of Japanese references -- tree spirits, paper doors and siblings being referred to as Big Brother and Big Sister -- without ever really succeeding in bringing the reader into the mind of the narrator, a child who has been evacuated to a school in the hills of the city, just before the atomic bomb is dropped.
But most of the time, the writer pulls it off. He has a knack of bringing the reader under the skin of his characters, subtly exposing the universal urges which make them tick. At the same time, he does not ignore the influence a particular society or situation can have on the characters of its people.
In the story Tehran Calling, an American woman visits her western-educated Iranian friend who has returned to her homeland to help organise political dissent against the oppressive government. Half-sceptical of the atrocities her friend claims are happening there -- "any place reprehended by an administration itself so reprehensible couldn't be all that bad" -- she decides to go as a kind of escape while recovering from the end of an unhealthy romantic relationship.
The break-up is at once painful and a source of guilt, lying as it does in stark contrast with the life-and-death situation her friend finds herself in. "I'm sorry that my problems -- that they were never as impressive as yours," she says to her friend at one point, feeling that she is owed some small sympathy even as she acknowledges the pettiness of her own problems.
It is testament to the writer's skill that her absorption with her own problems, which are admittedly petty in the larger scheme of things, still engages the reader's symphathy as she stumbles her way to a kind of catharsis. It doesn't matter where you are from, the writer seems to be saying; in our own ways, we are all adrift in uncertain seas.
3 people found this review helpful
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3 out of 5
by
Paul
from
Oakland, CA | Aug 3, 2008
I'll admit it. I sort of fell in love with this book's cover as soon as I sawl it on the New Fiction table at Bailey/Coy. I hemmed and hawed, picked it up and put it down, then finally let Michiko Kakutani and Mary Gaitskill convince me to fork over the $25. What I got from these stories, initially, was a really strong McSweeney's vibe. I couldn't quite put my finger on why this was, but the feeling was sustained, and eventually I figured it out. In the first story, Le writes about a writer struggling to write a story for a Iowa workshop. The writer is Vietnamese, like Le, but he doesn't want to write about Vietnamese people, since he feels like this'll be an "Ethnic lit is really hot right now" copout. In the remainder of the stories save one, he writes about anything but Vietnam. The jacket's flap says it all: "stories that take us from the slums of Colombia to the streets of Tehran; from New York City to Iowa City; from a tiny fishing village in Australia to a foundering vessel in the South China Sea." And so what it was, I realized, what was giving me that McSweeney's vibe, was the feeling of reading something that was just slightly less than authentic. And I mean just slightly. The italicized jargon -- of which there's a lot -- doesn't really call itself out as having been researched, and none of the stories feel underdeveloped, but I just couldn't let myself fall completely into the narratives. I thought the stories were good, just not great.
Brief sidenote, check out this sentence: '"The child has the sickness," a voice said without a second thought.' What? A voice said without a second thought? I have no idea what that means, and I'm actually not sure it makes sense.
Anyway, I'd love to read a novel by this guy, since I think the discipline of sticking to one subject might do him well. I just hope he'll embrace his ethnicity, though, so that he can write about pathos and human interaction, rather than trying to prove how un-Vietnamese he is by writing about Colombians and Iranians. Good young writer to keep an eye on.
2 people found this review helpful