Reviews
This book is everything to me. It explores so many heavy issues but also a heartbreaking story of love and loss. Truly incredible.
"If you forget me, then you've gone too far; turn back"Words can seldom describe how Man truly feels, and yet there are some words which not only describe but also incite similar feelings in us. This is one such example; a book I had to put aside many times in order to breathe and contemplate the abyss of my own soul, the spiritual ravine which lit up with each of Vuong's words."What is a country but a life sentence?"PTSD, childhood trauma, child abuse, otherness, alienation, immigration, racism, religion, meaning, suffering, death, love, loss, homosexuality... I could not believe how many issues did this brief work of genius tackle. Its words are simple, merely words we use in our daily exchange. But their structure and what they stand for when combined together is more than what any ordinary man can usually communicate. "It was everything I hid from everything that made me want to be a sun, the only thing I knew that had no shadow."It is mostly the narrator's honesty which got me; not only toward other people but towards himself as well. I remember a podcast by Benjamin McEvoy in which he talked about the importance of applying the best of what we read to our own lives. In this respect, I can only hope that one day the wounds of the psyche, which society had taught us to hide and conceal, would let me be honest with myself in a similar manner..."Let no one mistake us for the fruit of violence - but that violence, having passed through the fruit, failed to spoil it".
⋆. 𐙚 ˚two / five stars ✰sometimes you are erased before you are given the choice of stating who you are.ᯓ this book features our narrator, affectionately called "little dog," writing a letter to his mother who cannot read english, in which he discusses various experiences throughout his life. vietnamese, but moved to america with his parents when he was just a child, the narrator goes over the bullying that turns into racism, the discovery of love which turns into an exploration of sexuality, grief and family and what it's like to be not just an immigrant, but a queer immigrant, in america.on paper, this book sounded like one that would shatter my heart into pieces. i've heard so many people sing their praises for the writing, the prose, the storytelling. but those things ended up being what took me out of the story and ultimately ruined the book for me.it felt almost like a stream of consciousness, like when someone is telling you a story but then they go off on tangents and ramble on about ... everything? nothing? who really knows, right? this often felt like words were just being written to be written, with no real meaning or point to them.it is no accident, ma, that the comma resembles a fetus - that curve of continuation. we were all once inside our mothers, saying, with our entire curved and silent selves, more, more, more.and other times, it felt like a #emo teenage boy writing in his journal.they say everything happens for a reason - but i can't tell you why the dead always outnumber the living.it's not fair the that word laughter is trapped inside slaughter.they say nothing lasts forever but they're just scared it will last longer than they can love it.there were a concerning amount of times where i, as a reader, felt like the author didn't even know what they were trying to say. like they had written so much fluff about seemingly nothing, that they completely lost the plot. i really just couldn't get past the writing or the narrative, and i was taken completely out of the story because of it.i see the beauty in the book, i really do. i enjoyed reading about our narrator's experiences, and did feel for him, especially in part three regarding the storyline with trevor. but i do just feel like had this been approached differently by the author, i would have liked it infinitely more. i did learn that ocean vuong wrote poetry before he turned to novels, which actually makes a lot of sense when you look at how this was written. it was poetry disguised as a novel, which frankly isn't something that i think should be done after reading this. embrace writing poetry, not a novel that loses itself in overwritten, flowery sentences. because sure, there were a lot of great quotes in here, but it ultimately felt like it was trying too hard most of the time, and that resulted in a low rating for me.it's a beautiful country, she's been told, depending on who you are.in two, it was the only thought i could keep, sitting in my seat, how losing a person could make more of us, the living, make us two.is that what art is? to be touched thinking what we feel is ours when, in the end, it was someone else, in longing, who finds us?𐙚⋆.˚pre-readdon’t mind me ... just starting another book ...
