Tasha’s Reviews > The Emperor of Gladness > Status Update

Well I don’t eat pork and haven’t since I was little. If I did eat it, I would probably stop after reading that about the pigs. Matter of fact, there was a whole section on a monkey in On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. Gruesome stuff. That last chapter ended with a bit of foreshadowing. Are Hai’s lies to his mom and his addiction going to catch up to him?

The best parts are Hai’s time with his screwball restaurant coworkers. He seems to go outside his own head when he’s with them. Those parts are funny but also gross. I’m never eating at such places again! His relationship with Ganzina - dementia and all - is touching in a weird way. Vuong loses me a bit with some of the dialogues, though. He’s getting in the way, using the characters to lecture.

I have a solid opinion on this now that I’m 100 pages in. It’s good. It’s very different from On Earth in tone but similar at the same time. The MCs in both are deeply melancholy and I get the feeling that both are a least a little autobiographical. So one may dislike this if they like the way On Earth was written. But if they enjoyed it because of the subject matter, then I think they’ll like this too.

So Grazina shows Hai her dead husband’s library and he’s happier than a pig in shit. I can relate!
“Rows and rows of the perennial classics: Homer, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Austen, Montaigne, Flaubert, Turgenev, Faulkner. But there were also Nabokov, Toomer, Salinger, Atwood, Baldwin, Morrison.” He notices holes in Camus’s The Stranger and chooses The Brothers Karamazov to read. This is a sign!!!

It’s more prosy and less abstract than On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. There’s a lot of vivid descriptions; I think Vuong spends about ten pages just describing the layout of the town. I think this is going to be a slow read and I don’t know how I feel about it yet other than that.