this is not a book review part 1
this is not a review of Ocean Vuong's On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, but it is a snapshot of my thoughts as I finished the book
(taken over the Waitangi weekend, Opoutere coast on Coromandel)
25/02/2024
I race to the end. How do you go from wanting to be an author when you grow up to not being able to finish a novel? Tonight such questions didn’t bother me as I gave this book another crack. Liz lent me her copy sometime late last year and having made good progress in January, I had naively told myself I could finish a novel each month. That is only 12. Now as February ends and I race to the end, it’s looking more like 6. Life is more than such numbers of course. Maybe I will make it to 11.
My first book of 2024 will be Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. Although written with care, it often feels like we’re guided through beautiful prose to bursts of lucid realisation that draw a little too much attention to themselves. I love every impact sentence and the blunt insight they offer, but I wonder if some could be left to the imagination. This is a tiny nitpick of course, but it is one of several reasons I feel detached reading this intensely personal tale. Often throughout my life after reading something I consider ‘good’ I end up mimicking their voice. This goes for novels and even rap music. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery and all that.
28/02/2024
Three days later, a promise completed. The last stretch included a significant detour of poetry I rather enjoyed. The book truly opens up once we meet Trevor and I didn’t expect us to spend time grappling with sexuality on top of everything else.
Mark Twain catches a stray as a member of the white institutional elite which feels a little out of place in a book set against the consequences of imperialism which Twain was a relentless critic of. It wasn’t just a broad, vague jabs at imperialism either, it was expressly imperialism justified by the logic of white supremacy as his essay “To the Person Sitting in Darkness”, satirises. Not that I had much expectations in this respect, but it is a little disappointing.
I’ve always enjoyed reading reviews. As far back as I can remember browsing the internet, I liked just reading what other people had to say.
As I try to write more, I must also keep reading.
This is something that goes for movies so I see no reason it wouldn’t go for literature: even in something you adore, there is much to learn from the negative reviews. And I don’t mean the 3 star ones, I mean the complete opposite end of adoration. Skimming through negative reviews for this book I notice a common pattern – the most scathing observations seem to zero in on specific passages that felt pretentious or fluffy. I guess I could agree some of them stick out a bit, but personally it was more so the culmination of many little passages that struck my immersion.
P.S. The use of 50 Cent to colour in the pop culture of the time using Trevor to show what’s cool and rebellious for white people was neither here nor there, but when it came back near the end as a means of generating actual pathos this interpolation reached its ceiling, smacking its head clumsily. I don’t expect Vuong to have something groundbreaking to say about the Black American experience, but it came across really corny.
on the plane to Wellington, a window seat by chance