Reseña del libro "The Emperor of Gladness (en Inglés)"
Ocean Vuong returns with a big-hearted novel about chosen family, unexpected friendship, and the stories we tell ourselves in order to survive.
One late summer evening in the post-industrial town of East Gladness, Connecticut, nineteen-year-old Hai stands on the edge of a bridge in pelting rain, ready to jump, when he hears someone shout across the river. The voice belongs to Grazina, an elderly widow succumbing to dementia, who convinces him to take another path. Bereft and out of options, he quickly becomes her caretaker. Over the course of the year, the unlikely pair develops a life-altering bond, one built on empathy, spiritual reckoning, and heartbreak, with the power to alter Hai’s relationship to himself, his family, and a community at the brink.
Following the cycles of history, memory, and time, The Emperor of Gladness shows the profound ways in which love, labor, and loneliness form the bedrock of American life. At its heart is a brave epic about what it means to exist on the fringes of society and to reckon with the wounds that haunt our collective soul. Hallmarks of Vuong’s writing – formal innovation, syntactic dexterity, and the ability to twin grit with grace through tenderness – are on full display in this story of loss, hope, and how far we would go to possess one of life’s most fleeting mercies: a second chance.
The Emperor of Gladness is a poetic, dramatic and vivid story. It has an epic sweep but it also handles intimacy and love with delicacy and deep originality. Its two main characters - the young Hai, so smart and troubled and ready for the world, and Grazina, who carries the weight of history as both burden and rare wisdom - are taken from the margins of American life by Ocean Vuong and, by dint of great sympathy and imaginative genius, placed at the very center of our world - Colm Tóibín
Tender and moving, The Emperor of Gladness is about people on the margins of society and sanity. To my surprise and delight, Vuong’s novel is also wryly, subtly, wittily - and sometimes outrageously - a comedy as well as a tragedy - Rebecca Solnit
A masterwork - Bryan Washington
Sad, haunting but ultimately hopeful this is a gut punch and an warm embrace rendered out of poetic, tender prose - AnOther, Books to Look Out For 2025*
[An] innovative, playful novel’ - Financial Times, Books to Look Out For 2025*
Ocean Vuong (Ciudad Ho Chi Minh, antes Saigón, 1988) emigró a Estados Unidos con su familia en 1990, tras pasar un año en un campo de refugiados en Filipinas. En 2014 recibió la beca Ruth Lilly / Sargent Rosenberg de la Poetry Foundation y con el poemario Cielo nocturno con heridas de fuego ganó el Whiting Award y el Forward Prize en Estados Unidos y el Premio T. S. Eliot en Inglaterra. Sus textos se han publicado en medios como The Atlantic, Harper’s, The Nation, New Republic,The New Yorker y The New York Times. Es profesor en el Amherst College de Massachusetts. En la tierra somos fugazmente grandiosos es su primera novela.
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