‘The Boat’ by Nam Le

The narrator of the opening story, Nam, is (as was the author) a student at the famed Iowa Writers' Workshop, and he has a major assignment due. "Just write a story about Vietnam," is the advice of a fellow student, when told of Nam's writer's block: after all, ethnic is hot! Whereupon Nam's father, a survivor of the My Lai massacre and three years of "re-education" by the Vietcong, arrives from Sydney on a visit, and what at first seems wonderful source material becomes a revelation - of the inviolability of family; of the inadequacy of language for a memory stained by violence, death and separation; and of the writer's obligation nevertheless to try and register that sorrow, to show the resilience of the human spirit in the face of vertiginous reality.

If there is such a thing as a literary stress position, then in the stories that follow, Le, who was born in Vietnam and raised in Melbourne, makes his characters adopt it: there is a child assassin in the Colombian drug wars, a terminally ill painter in New York whose only child is lost to him, and a Hiroshima family in the days before 6 August 1945 - all for whom "trying to think and trying to forget amounted to the same thing." Le's limpid prose is perfectly paced; the versatility of voice and point-of-view is masterly. Exhilarating narrative sleights-of-hand regularly propel these fictions in unexpected directions.

Kafka's dictum - alluded to in the closing image of the first story - was that literature should be the axe which breaks open the frozen sea within us. The Boat is an icebreaker, all right: there is nowhere, it seems, that it is not prepared to go.