There are those who live through pain, their existence so pure that to talk lightly of any subject in their presence is a sacrilege. I’m not one of them. Sure I have known intense and all-encompassing pain, but self-consciousness snaps me out of it, usually. To ravel in pain is a privilege of the youth, which is why as an older reader, I ploughed through the dense poetic prose, oscillating between recognition and detachment: I recognize the young grief and the effort to make sense of it all, but detach from the overtly personal details and the obscure descriptions that lack contexts.
But most of Vuong’s descriptions are compelling. Being a poet, he is good at stringing together seemingly irrelevant images to shed surprising light on the mundane. Knowing his literary theories, he is also good at justifying the forms he chooses. The concept of “Kishotenketsu”, for instance, makes sense of an otherwise fragmented structure. I want to buy this justification, but can’t help thinking that for a novelist, it is perhaps an easy way out. Similarly, when he defends autobiographical writing by saying he wants to “invite” the gaze and then deny it, I wonder if placing the story in a different time and space isn’t more creative after all.
It is all too raw for me. The talent and the pain.