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Myshkin1981 t1_j51c2wd wrote

Reply to comment by el0011101000101001 in Just finished reading “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous” by Ocean Vuong, and it was amazing by Stanley910

I agree with this. I still thought the book was worthwhile, especially in its blunt honesty about the burgeoning sexuality of a young gay man. But Vuong is a poet, and you could tell that this book was written by a poet. That’s not a good thing. One shouldn’t approach the writing of a novel as if it were a long prose poem. Every other aspect of this novel suffered for Vuong’s focus on the prose, and as you pointed out, some of the lines he came up with are immature and cringeworthy. Some of those lines might work in a poem, but are glaringly misplaced in a work of narrative prose

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just_a_wolf t1_j52j2rn wrote

I hard disagree. I really loved this book. People are way too worried about being "cringe" lately, and it's making their creative work soulless and derivative as shit. Taking risks is a good thing in art.

There have been books that are or read like poetry as long as literature has been around, saying that it's a bad thing for a book to read like poetry is a really bizarre take. This was a book about the nature and structure of language and self discovery so telling the story in this meditative way, like a dreamy deconstructed journal entry to himself, felt super authentic to me.

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knobbodiwork t1_j545o0b wrote

yeah that comment is so strange to me, because i did feel like it was very clear that he was a poet, but exclusively that came across to me as a good thing.

i'm not sure why poetic language in an autobiographical novel is a bad thing, especially given how emotionally fraught the narrative was

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el0011101000101001 t1_j55ep0g wrote

I think Myshkin1981's criticism is valid. Vuong focuses too much on trying to create "profound" prose and not enough on a cohesive narrative so the end result is a fragmented collected of meandering phrases. I think this is the poet in him not translating for long form well.

To me, it comes off as a shallow person trying write intellectual & deep prose but it's immature, tedious, and yes, cringe. There were just too many obvious and bad metaphors.

I am really surprised so many people like this book, one of the worst books I've read in recent years.

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