1964: When commencing his mass bombing campaign in North Vietnam, General Curtis LeMay, then chief of staff of the US Air Force, said he planned on bombing the Vietnamese ‘back into the Stone Ages.’ To destroy a people, then, is to set them back in time. The US military would end up releasing over ten thousand tons of bombs in a country no larger than the size of Califronia—surpassing the number of bombs deployed in all of WWII combined.
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I never wanted to build a ‘body of work,’ but to preserve these, our bodies, breathing and unaccounted for, inside the work.
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They will want you to succeed, but never more than them. They will write their names on your leash and call you necessary, call you urgent.
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I can’t tell how I feel about this book, because on the one hand it was very affecting and very difficult to put down, and also, like, by rights it should have captivated me, because Vuong’s prose is gorgeous and I, too, am gay and obsessed with lit theory, although Vuong’s preferences on that front clearly skew more poststructuralist than my own (perhaps this is (part of) the problem?). I did love part II, and part III also really worked for me, but the whole...I don’t know. something just never quite clicked for me, I guess? ugh, I wish I could put my finger on what specifically it is.
...maybe it’s just that when it comes down to it I think it could have stood to be slightly less a 242-page prose poem and slightly more a novel.
EDIT: to put this a different way, which is reductive and unfair but does a better job capturing what didn’t quite satisfy me about this book: the best parts of it are the parts that don’t sound like they’re from a New Yorker story.
EDIT again: having discussed this more in a book group I really do think it’s mostly the poststructuralism thing. Vuong is really into it and I’m...really not; insofar as this is a novel/prose poem I think it’s beautifully written and really compelling and gripping; insofar as it’s a work of literary theory/philosophy (and it is also that), it’s interesting but doesn’t work for me; so: four stars.
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