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It takes me four years to thoroughly finish this book.
I read the first story four years ago and love this author since then. People in the west tend to consider Le as an immigrant writer because of his unusual personal history. They consider all those exotic stories fantastic and people born and raised like this somehow have the duty to write about these things, people they'll never meet, lives they'll never live and burdens they'll never carry. It makes sense that people tend to be curious about these things so far away from their lives, but somehow I consider this as a bad taste of reading. Writers like Le, and Junot Diaz, Mohsin Hamid shouldn't just be treated as some immigrant writer. They've lived in US or UK for enough time to write stories just like those local writers. They don't need some exotic marketing angle, surely not some stupid labels such as Vietnamese Australian author.
After reading this book for such a long time, now I love the Halflead Bay more than the Love and Honor one. The latter one shows some smart attitude to those readers who are expecting Le to write about his own story. It looks like a true story, yet all of these things are made up. Halflead Bay, just like the story Le wrote in 2012, The Yarra, is about Australian's life, and that's the real life Le has lived since he went to Australia after he was born. He's spent almost all his life in Australia and the West, it seems stupid to put some Asian-immigrant label on him. Halflead Bay is also one of the earliest stories Le has ever written. It's a story about Australian teenager and his family. Not like other stories in this book that are mostly made up by collecting materials in a researching way, this Australian story is much closer to Le's normal life and has a lot of brilliant also frustrated moments. It's also the longest story in this book. Other stories in this book happened in different places, such as Tehran, New York and Hiroshima. They are quite well written by this young author. He uses the same method of collecting materials in the law firm to write these stories, which is smart, and made all these things more real, but somehow these characters are not that connected to readers. We can see how these people end up like this in their lives, but it's just not that easy to share the feelings with them. And maybe Le's put too much effort on making things real, these stories end in a hurry, some words haven't been said, some feelings haven't been showed and some people haven't been forgiven. The feelings just hang in the middle of nowhere that readers may not feel the same at all.
But I still love Le's first work, and consider him one of the smartest writers at his age.
I read the first story four years ago and love this author since then. People in the west tend to consider Le as an immigrant writer because of his unusual personal history. They consider all those exotic stories fantastic and people born and raised like this somehow have the duty to write about these things, people they'll never meet, lives they'll never live and burdens they'll never carry. It makes sense that people tend to be curious about these things so far away from their lives, but somehow I consider this as a bad taste of reading. Writers like Le, and Junot Diaz, Mohsin Hamid shouldn't just be treated as some immigrant writer. They've lived in US or UK for enough time to write stories just like those local writers. They don't need some exotic marketing angle, surely not some stupid labels such as Vietnamese Australian author.
After reading this book for such a long time, now I love the Halflead Bay more than the Love and Honor one. The latter one shows some smart attitude to those readers who are expecting Le to write about his own story. It looks like a true story, yet all of these things are made up. Halflead Bay, just like the story Le wrote in 2012, The Yarra, is about Australian's life, and that's the real life Le has lived since he went to Australia after he was born. He's spent almost all his life in Australia and the West, it seems stupid to put some Asian-immigrant label on him. Halflead Bay is also one of the earliest stories Le has ever written. It's a story about Australian teenager and his family. Not like other stories in this book that are mostly made up by collecting materials in a researching way, this Australian story is much closer to Le's normal life and has a lot of brilliant also frustrated moments. It's also the longest story in this book. Other stories in this book happened in different places, such as Tehran, New York and Hiroshima. They are quite well written by this young author. He uses the same method of collecting materials in the law firm to write these stories, which is smart, and made all these things more real, but somehow these characters are not that connected to readers. We can see how these people end up like this in their lives, but it's just not that easy to share the feelings with them. And maybe Le's put too much effort on making things real, these stories end in a hurry, some words haven't been said, some feelings haven't been showed and some people haven't been forgiven. The feelings just hang in the middle of nowhere that readers may not feel the same at all.
But I still love Le's first work, and consider him one of the smartest writers at his age.