Finished Nam Le’s excellent collection of short stories, The Boat, today.
There are a number of fantastic stories here - ranging over an incredibly varied set of lives and locales; Nam Le gives us a teenage hitman fearing for his life in Cartegena, as well as a confused Australian boy feeling the many pressures of life in his coastal town bearing down on him, and an American woman submerging herself in an alien culture while visiting her friend in Tehran.
The piece set in Iran, Tehran Calling, was my favorite; Nam Le’s ability to conjure up the sense of diving into a world wholly other from one’s own was remarkable-
The shadows thrown by the tree boughs against her skin looked like the written language here: half-open mouths, fishhooks, sickle blades, pregnant letters with dots in their bellies. An alphabet refracted in water. She closed her eyes. Again, the faint thud of drums.
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