The Boat
Nam Le, . . Knopf, $22.95 (271pp) ISBN 978-0-307-26808-2
From a Colombian slum to the streets of Tehran, seven characters in seven stories struggle with very particular Swords of Damocles in Pushcart Prize winner Le's accomplished debut. In “Halflead Bay,” an Australian mother begins an inevitable submission to multiple sclerosis as her teenage son prepares for the biggest soccer game of his life. The narrator of “Meeting Elise,” a successful but ailing artist in Manhattan, mourns his dead lover as he anticipates meeting his daughter for the first time since she was an infant. The opening “Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice” features a Vietnamese character named Nam who is struggling to complete his Iowa Writer's Workshop master's as his father comes for a tense visit, the first since an earlier estrangement shattered the family. The story's ironies—“You could
Reviewed on: 03/31/2008
Genre: Fiction
Downloadable Audio - 978-1-4561-0948-6
Hardcover - 271 pages - 978-1-84767-160-8
Hardcover - 271 pages - 978-0-385-66556-8
Open Ebook - 194 pages - 978-0-307-26946-1
Open Ebook - 1 pages - 978-1-84767-409-8
Other - 978-0-307-37245-1
Paperback - 288 pages - 978-0-385-66557-5
Paperback - 288 pages - 978-1-84767-161-5