Following the attention Australian author Nam Le has been receiving overseas, he is interviewed in "The Sydney Morning Herald" by Michael Williams.
When we talk about his literary influences and the many things he loves to read, he cites poets first of all: Auden and Rilke, Tennyson and Eliot. In fiction, he cites Moby Dick, almost sheepishly confessing that he hadn't read Melville's classic before moving to the US. "I read it when I was living in Provincetown on the Cape [Cod]. There was a motel down the street called Moby Dick; another one around the corner called The White Whale. It felt like the proper place to read it." This awareness of the relationship between place and the act of reading or writing seems appropriate given the peripatetic nature of The Boat. After all, this is a collection that takes its readers from Iowa to Tehran, Hiroshima to small-town Australia. The playful shifting through different geographical settings came about largely by chance, as each story dictated. Setting, Le says, "depended on what happened to be squatting or taking up real estate in my head at the time".
