NAM Le takes us around the world in 271 wince-making, heart-breaking pages of a debut collection disarming for its grace and notable for its incisive, memorable prose. Containing deft slices of portraiture which feel like they've been taken from lar
ger canvases, his stories touch upon fragmented lives of hardship, with assurance, tenderness and an honest eye to the capriciousness of reality.
Bookended by stories about his native Vietnam, Le's narrative range is one of a number of things to be seduced by. Those who sail in The Boat speak formal Vietnamese and colloquial Australian, while 'Cartagena' is marbled with Colombian Spanish, as bandied between the street gang. We are tossed from one mindscape to another – a troubled adolescent in the outback; New York's Central Park and an ageing artist adrift between thoughts of meeting his daughter and lascivious reveries of the love of his life; a refugee amid the wretched stink of a vomit-strewn vessel attempting escape on the South China Seas.
Le transports these experiences into our sphere of cognisance with the verbal balance and taut power of a high-wire artist. His words are by turn weights and weapons; torches that uncover stifled truths with linguistic dexterity: "an alphabet refracted in water" describes an unknown language; a lover "unmakes" a smile, an assassin's mind is "dark as an empty barrel". His thrilling command of words is a celebration of the possibilities they contain. The pace too is admirable. Building to a crescendo, atmosphere comes from a steady layering of detail, sharp bursts of action, clatter and smells, as in 'Tehran Calling'. Firecrackers, burning meat, stall vendors and candles juxtapose with the rhetorical introspection of 'Sarah', an admirable marriage between the external and the internal that he frequently deploys.
The emotional anchor of these stories is the search for something, intimated in Auden's words, "the flares of desperation rise", and the wind in their sails the giddy "urge" to tell out a clutch of lives. One seeks his father's approval, another respect, yet others self-discovery and power. Ragged flotsam in their different corners of the world, regardless of age, class or wealth, the stories and their people coalesce into a transcendent whole, with sense that Le is writing about everyone and no one at once, and that we will read them most avidly for the comfort of knowing we are not alone.
The full article contains 407 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
