Ocean Vuong's The Emperor of Gladness

I loved the opening and many early sections, but I got into a part of the narrative where the writing sort of spiraled out of control and became unwieldy and almost without discipline. It could have written with some stricter editing and at that point I realized that the book is not plotted very tightly, it is carried by the elegant turns of phrasing, the observations, the literary history that informs it, but yet it's still sort of amorphous and wobbling as a piece in it's own right. I have taken a break from it and may or may not go back to it.

I read his other work - On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, which was so compelling and if it also lacked the discipline I didn't notice or care because I just read the whole thing straight through. And his poetry is also amazing, very original and deeply felt.

With this book there's just this underlying disappointment I am feeling.

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