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just_a_wolf t1_j52j2rn wrote

Reply to comment by Myshkin1981 in Just finished reading “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous” by Ocean Vuong, and it was amazing by Stanley910

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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