Nam Le returns with poetry, but the question is: Where’s his novel?

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Sixteen years after The Boat, his barnstorming book of short stories, Nam Le has surprised publishers and readers alike with a book of poems

by Alfred Noyes to the class. To the little boy who arrived in Australia as a babe in his parents’ arms after they fled Vietnam on a refugee boat, it had a profound impact.almost immediately. I think that’s what I did for ages,” he said. “I was reading whatever I could find ... whatever was available, which was mainly sort of the western English canon, and just soaking it in, revelling in it, and copying it.

For someone for whom English is not their first language, “there is a sense of continual reckoning with the language and with the ways in which it’s deployed and sometimes instrumentalised to keep you in your place, or to keep you out”.: ” ... Your language your leash ... Whatever I write is/ Vietnamese. I can never not – You won’t let me not – Lick the leash or bite it ...

“And it’s politically complicated in a way. Going back to Vietnam you are still being confronted with some of the after effects of the reasons why my parents left back in the ’70s.”was published in Vietnam, but parts of it were changed without Le being consulted, and he doesn’t think it likelywould be translated into a different language. “It would be a completely different beast, which is kind of exciting if it were to happen.”seven stories were agitating Le well before.

It seems not all his publishers were enamoured with the idea of a book of poetry appearing while they had been expecting his long-anticipated novel. Le had to fight for the book, although not with his Australian publisher he’s quick to point out.

 

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