When it was announced around two years ago that the new government had created the Prime Minister’s Literary Prize worth A$100,000 for the best fiction and non-fiction books of the year, I was pretty impressed. It’s truly nice to see writers getting some monetary recognition of the thousands of hours of work that go into the writing of a novel – or in the case of the 2009 winner, Nam Le, a collection of short stories.
I’ve been having a bit of an ambivalent relationship with short stories recently. I’d like to write more of them, because they’re obviously a smaller investment of time than a novel, and therefore valuable in the sense of getting practice at polishing my writing and getting some fiction published. But then I feel like a bit of a fraud, because what I really want to do is write novels, and short stories really are an entirely different genre, and it’s not fair to treat them as a “mini novel” just to get some practice. So I’d more or less abandoned reading them when Nam Le’s collection The Boat
Obviously, The Boat is an extremely well-written collection of stories. You can’t fault Nam Le’s writing. And if you look around the web at the various reviews, most people seem to think you can’t fault is diversity, either: the stories range from assassins in Colombia to Vietnamese women on boats to elderly men in America, so Nam Le is clearly able to write way beyond his personal experience.
But. I’m sorry to say there’s a “but”. I really want to adore this collection of stories. And I definitely think that Le deserves his $100,000, for he’s an extremely talented writer, and has got a lot of well-deserved praise. But, personally, I just felt like this collection is too diverse, too unconnected, and I know there’s no rule that says a collection of short stories should be connected but I just felt like they all belonged elsewhere. I mean, I guess if I read these stories elsewhere and independently, I would recognise Nam Le’s style and feel them to be a little connected, but as a book to hold in my hands and read, it just doesn’t do it for me. And my second (related) “but” is that knowing these stories all came from the same author disconcerted me a little; it’s hard to believe that one person could know so much about the life and culture in Iran, Colombia, Vietnam and Australia, all at once. Of course, in a way that’s the sign of a great fiction writer, but I just felt like I couldn’t quite trust him that it’s all how it really is. Okay, enough of my rambling, because obviously thousands of other people love this book, so I’ll leave you to decide for yourselves.
Tags: Nam Le, Prime Minister's Award