User Reviews
Rating: really liked it
By the time you finish reading
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, you will have understood what Ocean Vuong meant when he said, “I wrote a phantom novel”. The phantom is about the past; the phantom straddles multiple worlds, passing and trespassing; the phantom clings to something long gone, inconsolable and beyond reach; the phantom lingers in the periphery, dreaming of a center that might hold; and, ultimately, the phantom
remembers. The word, therefore, could not fit more perfectly into the contours of a novel that is fraught with history, cobbled together from truth and fiction, haunted by American violence, and primarily addressed to a spectral audience.
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is structurally, formally, and thematically
haunted—and
haunting. The novel is written in the form of a letter, addressed from a son to his mother who can’t read; a recipient who, like a ghost, is not promised—only longed for. “Dear Ma,” it begins, like an invocation meant to save him, “I am writing to reach you—even if each word I put down is one word further from where you are” (17). The narrator is Little Dog, a nickname given to him by his grandmother because “to love something is to name it after something so worthless it might be left untouched—and alive” (30), and his words are arms that cannot hold his illiterate mother whose education was capped at the age of five after a napalm raid destroyed her schoolhouse in Vietnam. The reader could just imagine her there, hovering at the edge of remembrance: stooped with decades of working in factories and nail salons, wilting her like an unwatered flower—those places “where dreams become the calcified knowledge of what it means to be awake in American bones—with or without citizenship—aching, toxic, and underpaid” (86). A mother the tighter he gripped, the more she melted away—like trying to hold on to the reflection of the moon.
The mother is a ghost who remains distant, unreachable, because the medium is English: the language that is most accessible, abundant, and malleable to the son, but which is an impenetrable country to his mother. The act of impossible reception becomes therefore an act of
impossible translation. Is English enough, asks the novel, to hold the complexity of this fraught and fragile inquiry between mother and son? And further, if a letter is only made possible by whom it is addressed to, then what is the use for language in the absence of a destination?
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is, in that sense, a very intimate display of an immigrant concern with the English language. In many places in the world, the English language is what makes people eligible—and legible. If you don't have the language, you are not seen. If you are not seen, you are locked outside comprehension. “Your mouth,” to borrow some of Vuong’s words, “is what gets you visibility”. With every morsel of English that grows and blossoms in Little Dog’s mouth, so too does the burden of translation. Little Dog must make his family visible by translating America to them and translating
them to America—and because the language is English, the stakes are enormous. The stakes are the perils of erasure, of invisibility, the deep terrible pain of betraying his parents in order to preserve them. “This is the oppressor’s language ”, in Adrienne Rich’s words, and the more of it Little Dog commits to paper, the further he is from his mother; and yet, as Rich also concedes in that same poem, Little Dog needs it to talk to her.
Little Dog's fraught and complex relationship with language seeps into form as well.
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is rendered in a brilliantly haphazard collection of vignettes; some several pages long, others only the space of a paragraph or two, often separated by a line, like two shores with no desire to touch but to simply achieve proximity. Even within these vignettes, disjointed memories clamor like bells, each one chiming against the next. There’s no chronology to follow here—Little Dog traces his way through this dizzying skein of tangled memory by a wanderer’s less certain compass. He recounts the past in tangents, detours, and circuits. He veers from the story, recomposes it, reaffirms it, goes back in time, recalls it, calls it back. Like a ghost, Vuong’s form is all
restlessness. This circularity, however, is not without purpose. It is redolent of queer and feminist thinking, a breaking with hegemonic narrative structures that favor easy, balanced, and digestible renderings. What Vuong does, and powerfully so, is demonstrate what language can do when it’s
unfettered from the strictures and conventions of narrative, and the detours thus become, not symptoms of language failing, but rather a safe passage to a destination. Even if the destination is a dead end, because “to be lost,” in Vuong’s hands, “is not to be wrong, but to be more.”
This push and pull of language, this breaking open of form into meaning, makes
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous so clearly the novel of a poet. But halfway through, the novel also literally
disintegrates into poetry. That
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous can contain both prose and poetry inside the skin of a single novel is not just craftmanship, it is also necessity. These moments of collapse expose both the enormity of Little Dog’s trauma and the difficulty of recounting it. They occur when Little Dog is overstrained by too much responsibility, too much fear and uncertainty: Little Dog’s fugitive love affair with a boy whose youth is withering into earth with every swallow of the opioids he’s addicted to. Little Dog’s grandmother—once a teenage bride escaping an arranged marriage, “her body, her purple dress…[keeping] her alive” (35) as a prostitute for American GIs—succumbing more and more to the dark pull of schizophrenia. Little Dog lost between all the contradictions of his mother, her love and her blows, the heart-breaking paradox of traumatized parents subjecting their children to trauma in an effort to spare them from trauma. To live in an American body, the novel seems to say, is to be constantly on the verge of falling apart. And when language falls apart—stretching and tearing with the strain of violence, of trauma, of too many ghosts—it crumbles into poetry. Caressing, fluid,
unforgettable poetry. In
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Vuong’s restless poetic explorations push the English language to its limits, breaking it apart. The poetry, in that sense, is realized in the aftermath of insupportable prose. When a story is too heavy for the medium supposed to carry it, collapse is inevitable—but collapse is not failure. It's salvation. There’s art in the debris, insists the novel, and a promise to start over. Thus, in breaking into poetry,
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous also breaks itself towards completion: a few (poetic) pages later, the novel picks itself up again, and continues in prose. The fractures are not only survivable, they’re also a stepping-stone towards wholeness.
In short, what Vuong does in this novel with language and form, how he then transmutes that into thematic valence, is nothing short of extraordinary. I'm simply, endlessly in awe.
Rating: really liked it
“All freedom is relative—you know too well—and sometimes it’s no freedom at all, but simply the cage widening far away from you, the bars abstracted with distance but still there, as when they “free” wild animals into nature preserves only to contain them yet again by larger borders. But I took it anyway, that widening.”
4 1/2 stars. Stunning.
On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is quite a book. It is not surprising that the author is a poet, as this reads almost like a poetry collection - prose poems, each capturing a moment, a memory, a feeling, or an idea so beautifully. It doesn't follow a regular narrative structure, but is instead a series of snippets or moments. The style won't be for everyone, but for those who love the raw punches of poetry, it is a fantastic book.
I found it difficult to believe this was fiction. There is something about Little Dog's story, a certain
raw honesty and earnestness, that seems to come from a place of truth. Maybe because much of it does. The author draws on recent and historical events, stories of well-known figures, artists and tragedies to weave his fictional story with every inch of our reality.
The book is a letter from Little Dog to his illiterate mother. He talks frankly about race, gender, sexuality, masculinity, grief and language, without allowing the book to be overwhelmed by the heavy subject matter. The last one - language - is a major theme, and the author explores the importance of language on both a micro and macro level - the choice of individual words and phrases, and the power (or lack of) bestowed upon an individual by having access to language and literacy.
For such a tiny novel, it is huge in its scope. From the Vietnam War to Barthes to Tiger Woods to 50 Cent to Little Dog's first romance with a white boy, it's somehow both a philosophical book about humanity and language, and a deeply personal bildungsroman.
It is impossible to categorize, but it is undeniably both brief and gorgeous.
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Rating: really liked it
So you go to a high-end restaurant with an elaborate tasting menu. You are served dishes with fancy names that involve sublimated beetroot gel and deconstructed potato foam, and though the experience is unique and artisanal, you go home feeling... unsated. My experience with this novel in a nutshell.
At first glance, Vuong’s book has all the ingredients of a winning novel — lyrical writing, fascinating themes, a topical premise. Taking the form of a long, confessional letter from a young Vietnamese immigrant to his illiterate mother, the novel explores race, otherness and queer identity. What’s not to love? Sadly, the book ultimately felt hollow and unsatisfying due to its performative quality. “On Earth” reads like the product of a writer modeling his work on the idea of the “serious literary novel”, having reverse-engineered a novel out of a checklist of common criteria. One can almost hear the author plotting in the background (“If I intersplice this historical chapter with scenes of animal torture, it will be so literary”). The result feels forced and highly manufactured, full of writing designed to distance and impress.
Even the lyrical writing, which at first appears the novel’s strongest suit, turns out to be an emperor without clothes. The text is continually yearning, reaching, grasping — trying to extract profundity out of moments without actually saying much. A sampler:
“A page, turning, is a wing lifted with no twin, and therefore no flight. And yet we are moved.”Do I sound harsh? I hope not. If I could speak to Vuong directly, I would say this:
You do not have to fold your story into a mould that you think will appeal to a ‘literary elite’. Drop the pretension. Shed the performance, and we may find — underneath all those layers — a unique and valuable testament.
Mood: Affected
Rating: 5.5/10
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Rating: really liked it
Ocean is a brilliant writer and I am a fan of his work. I even published him once in PANK! It has been thrilling to watch him soar. The prose in this novel is sublime. The way he writes is just… exquisite. He writes the body so well. He writes about the complicated relationship between a mother and son with real tenderness, with compelling honesty. He writes sex better than almost anyone out there. There are so many lines that gutted me or exhilarated me or stunned me. I wanted to sit with each line and just feel it as deeply as I could. The intimacy of the novel as a letter between a son and mother was poignant. That said, I just didn’t fall in love with this book. The prose was, perhaps, too beautiful, too resonant, without enough story behind it. That is a personal preference, the desire for story. As I got deeper into the novel, I kept wanting a clearer sense of where the story was going, I wanted to feel like there was more substance to hold all that style. I do still recommend this novel because I've never read anything like it.
Rating: really liked it
ON EARTH WE'RE BRIEFLY GORGEOUS will be described--rightly--as luminous, shattering, urgent, necessary. But the word I keep circling back to is raw: that's how powerful the emotions here are, and how you'll feel after reading it--scoured down to bone. With a poet's precision, Ocean Vuong examines whether putting words to one's experience can bridge wounds that span generations, and whether it's ever possible to be truly heard by those we love most.
Rating: really liked it
You want to read a book where it'll break your soul, heart, and mind but remake and rebuild them all at the same time????!!!!1!1! This book fucking wrecked me (no i didn't cry because everything inside me was dead anyways) BUT when I say everything—
e v e r y t h i n g— I felt reading this book: it all transcends and escalates into something that is literally close to basic divination.
Basically this book gave me superpowers I didn't know I had.
If you want that feeling, that punch of serotonin and straight up blessings while doing hot boy/girl shit vibes?
READ THIS GLORIOUS MAGNIFICENT MASTERPIECE!!! If you want to hear more about how much I talked about my favorite child, check out this video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67T8G...
5 BILLION GORGEOUS STARSTwitter | Bookstagram | Youtube |
Rating: really liked it
Sometimes, a book just hits you.
(Unsurprisingly, based on that first sentence, this is one of my favorites of the year. Find the full list: https://emmareadstoomuch.wordpress.co...)
I read 200+ books a year. This month, I’ve read almost a book a day. When I’m reading that much, it can just be because the stars aligned and gave me an insane amount of free time and I chose to spend it all on Bettering Myself Through Literature, but more often, it’s because I’m trying to escape from my snoozefest daily life and my annoying brain.
Currently, it’s the latter.
When I read that much, it can put the stories at a distance. Or really I want to immerse myself so much that I remove myself from the equation altogether and it’s all story, no impact on me.
But sometimes you get a good book at the perfect time and it cuts all that away, whether you want it to or not.
(I did not.)
This book is so, well, gorgeous. The writing and the story, the characters, the setting - none of it gives you a moment’s mercy. It’s unrelenting in its pain and its reality and its loveliness. I kept thinking this was a memoir, because fiction that feels like this is so rare, an incredible feat.
For the last 25% of this book, I kept thinking it had to be over at the next page, or the next - every sentence felt like another paper cut, every paragraph break a scrape, chapter endings f*cking road rash. It was unbearable. I had tears in my eyes through a third of it and I pride myself on being the coolest and least emotional person alive.
Jeez louise.
Bottom line: A book so good it makes me talk like an elderly person.
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pre-reviewoh, worth the wait.
review to come / 5 stars easily, obviously, painfully
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currently-reading updatesi saw this for the first time in a bookstore two years ago and have wanted to read it ever since.
better late than never?
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taking lily's idea and reading only books by asian authors this month!
book 1: the incendiaries
book 2: last night at the telegraph club
book 3: dear girls
book 4: sigh, gone
book 5: frankly in love
book 6: emergency contact
book 7: your house will pay
book 8: convenience store woman
book 9: on earth we're briefly gorgeous
Rating: really liked it
Recently, when I have opened my Goodreads web page, it has seemed to be full of people giving a lot of stars to this book and singing its praises in glowing reviews.
I opened the book with high hopes.
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous uses a fragmented narrative to tell, or perhaps explore is a better word, the life of Little Dog, a son born to Vietnamese immigrants into the USA. The reader gradually pieces together the story of Little Dog’s mother (Rose) and grandmother (Lan) along with Little Dog’s own experiences growing up, especially his teenage love affair with Trevor.
Ocean Vuong is an award-winning poet and this is very evident in this, his first novel. Many of the narrative fragments read like poetry and it feels as though every word has been agonised over before being committed to paper.
I should have loved this book. I have said time and time again that I look for atmosphere above plot in a book and Vuong’s fragmentary, poetic style certainly works through atmosphere and imagery rather than story-telling. It is the reader’s job to compile the story.
But, somehow, I just could not engage with the book at all. I think it was partly the effort that has clearly gone into the writing. Each word has been polished to become so perfect that the overall effect seems to hide the content from the reader (well, from this reader) rather than draw them in. For me, reading this felt like trying to penetrate a shell that would not yield to reveal its contents. That shell is undoubtedly beautiful, but I feel I am only admiring the exterior, not the heart, which, for a book so personal and intense seems self-defeating. Part of the problem I had is that the book is framed as a letter from the narrator to his mother. But it is made clear early on that the mother is illiterate, so we know from the outset that this is just a framing device to allow the author to give voice to his emotions. We know he is writing into a void, and so, it seems does he. I also have to acknowledge (trigger warning coming) that there is a scene fairly early on in the book that features gruesome animal cruelty which really upset me and made me hesitant to pick the book up again for a while and then very nervous as I was reading in case something similar should happen again. That’s a personal reaction as I am not good at dealing with animal cruelty in a book, but this is about my experience of the book so it has to include my personal view.
My thanks to Random House UK for making a copy of this novel available to me via NetGalley. I’m sorry I did not appreciate it more because I thought it was going to be a top read of 2019 for me and I ended up disappointed. I would give the book 3 stars but the animal cruelty really got under my skin and detrimentally affected my experience of the book.
Rating: really liked it
May 31 marks the 200th anniversary of Walt Whitman’s birth, and the best present we could possibly receive is Ocean Vuong’s debut novel, “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous.” The connection between the Good Gray Poet and this young Vietnamese immigrant may seem tenuous, but with his radical approach to form and his daring mix of personal reflection, historical recollection and sexual exploration, Vuong is surely a literary descendant of the author of “Leaves of Grass.” Emerging from the most marginalized circumstances, he has produced a lyrical work of self-discovery that’s shockingly intimate and insistently universal.
The fact that we can hear Vuong’s voice today in America stems from a function of tragedy and serendipity. As Vuong explains in his 2016 poetry collection, “Night Sky With Exit Wounds,” his grandfather was a U.S. soldier who found a farm girl in Vietnam. “Thus my mother exists,” he writes. “Thus I exist. Thus no bombs = no family = no me.”
That willingness to solve the equation of his own existence, no matter what its components, is a. . . .
To read the rest of this review, go to The Washington Post:https://www.washingtonpost.com/entert...
Rating: really liked it
Vuong is no doubt a skilled writer. His prose is always gorgeous and lovely. It’s the type of writing that I normally go for; this book just didn’t hit strongly enough for me to enjoy beyond the technical skill. I’m left wishing for more of a focused narrative and less of abstract vignettes. I question if it should have been a poetry collection rather than a novel.
Rating: really liked it
I am out here stanning the success of Ocean Vuong’s debut novel! As a fellow queer Vietnamese American, it feels so amazing to see someone with my same ethnic and queer identities breaking through in the literary world – and so sad that we have to fight so hard for our voices to be heard. This book took me on a scattershot, beautiful emotional journey. It felt less like reading a novel and more like reading tender, poignant passages about several connected moments: our narrator Little Dog accidentally triggering his immigrant mother by pretending to be an explosion, Little Dog listening to his grandmother’s stories of war and survival as she descends into mental decay, Little Dog reflecting on his gayness and the violence experienced by gay people both in Vietnam and in the United States. At several points I had little clue what was happening chronologically and where we were exactly in Little Dog’s life, and I didn’t feel too bothered by that lack of structure because of the visceral beauty of Vuong’s writing, like the moments he wrote about Little Dog translating English for his mother and grandmother and the weight that comes with that, how he wrote about so many specific moments related to immigration and trauma and resilience. I love even this brief passage that gives a small glimpse into the complexity of family and immigrant life, with Little Dog writing to his mother:
I remember walking with you to the grocery store, my father’s wages in your hands. How, by then, he had beaten you only twice – which meant there was still hope it would be the last. I remember armfuls of Wonder Bread and jars of mayo, how you thought mayo was butter, how in Saigon, butter and white bread were only eaten inside mansions guarded by butlers and steel gates. I remember everyone smiling back at the apartment, mayonnaise sandwiches raised to crack lips. I remember thinking we lived in a sort of mansion.
I remember thinking this was the American Dream as snow crackled against the window and night came, and we lay down to sleep, side by side, limbs tangled as the sirens wailed through the streets, our bellies full of bread and ‘butter.’”How could you not feel something with that level of quality detailed prose?
I give this four stars instead of five mostly because I feel like the romance weighed this book down. I just didn’t really feel like Little Dog’s relationship with Trevor contributed much to the book? Like, I appreciate the exploration of queerness in the context of being Asian American and within the context of an immigrant family. I also liked how Vuong wrote gay sex in a way that felt realistic in its messiness instead of doing what a lot of people – especially heterosexual women who write gay sex – do by glossing over its complexities and portraying it as seamlessly hot. But I didn’t really get much from Trevor and Little Dog together aside Little Dog dating a white boy with toxic masculinity issues. I wish there had been more interrogation of the power dynamics involved with dating a white person or even being intimate in any way with a white person when you have a marginalized racial/ethnic identity. Or I wish there had been more space to see Little Dog reclaim his power apart from his relationship with Trevor. My sense is that if the space devoted to Trevor had been both streamlined and redirected toward giving more structure to Little Dog’s relationship with his mother and grandmother,
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous would’ve been even more phenomenal.
A great read I would recommend to fans of poetry, poignant and emotional narratives, and my fellow queer and Vietnamese and/or Asian American readers. Just check out this lovely line and then check out the book if you’re so inclined:
Let no one mistake us for the fruit of violence – but that violence, having passed through the fruit, failed to spoil it.
Rating: really liked it
I read this for the Ruby Reads book club in January and it is one of the most lyrical narratives I have ever happened across. Vuong presents an atemporal account of life as Vietnamese immigrant in America. Vuong's imagery is painstakingly accurate and incredibly clever. He also captures the child's voice really well (the observations we make as children, but miss as adults). At once beautiful and heartbreaking, this novel is a masterpiece.
Rating: really liked it
I am thinking of beauty again, how some things are hunted because we have deemed them beautiful. If, relative to the history of our planet, an individual life is so short, a blink of an eye, as they say, then to be gorgeous, even from the day you’re born to the day you die, is to be gorgeous only briefly…sunset, like survival, exists only on the verge of its own disappearing. To be gorgeous, you must first be seen, but to be seen allows you to be hunted.
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“Everything good is somewhere else, baby. I’m telling you.”
Take one beam of light. Direct it through a prism. It will separate into its component colors. Reading Ocean Vuong is a bit like this. He takes words, images, and concepts, beams them through his prismatic, gravitic artistry, and the result is a spreading rainbow, bending in several directions. It is a bit of a trip reading
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. Go ahead, take the Vuong acid. This is a trip worth taking.
Ocean Vuong - image from
The Guardian - credit Adrian Pope
On Earth… is not all straightforward story-telling, although there is plenty of that in here. It is a mix of elements.
The parts. The form. Little Dog is writing an extended letter to his mother, Rose, telling her of his experiences, a letter she will not, cannot ever read. He had tried teaching her to read English, but she gave up in short order, claiming that she had gotten that far being able to see, so did not really need it. Uncomfortable, too, with the dis-order of a child teaching a parent. The story of helping at the nail salon where she worked, where the workers inhale culture as well as toxic chemicals.
In the nail salon, sorry is a tool one used to pander until the word itself becomes currency. It no longer merely apologizes, but insists, reminds: I'm here, right here, beneath you. It is the lowering of oneself so that the client feels right, superior, and charitable. In the nail salon, one’s definition of sorry is deranged into a new work entirely, one that’s charged and reused as both power and defacement at once. Being sorry pays, being sorry even, or especially, when one has no fault, is worth every self-deprecating syllable the mouth allows. Because the mouth must eat.
The History. Family. Little Dog tells of his grandmother, Lan, in Viet Nam, marrying a GI, bearing him a child, Little Dog’s mother. Being left behind when the USA fled. His history with his grandmother, their closeness, how she protected him as much as she could. When he was tasked with plucking the white hairs from her head, she would tell him stories.
As I plucked, the blank walls around us did not so much fill with fantastical landscapes as open to them, the plaster disintegrating to reveal the past behind it. Scenes from the war, mythologies of manlike monkeys, of ancient ghost catchers from the hills of Da Lat who were paid in jugs of rice wine, who traveled through villages with packs of wild dogs and spells written on palm leaves to dispel evil spirits.
The story of his mother, growing up in Viet Nam, ostracized for being too white, her PTSD as an adult, and how that manifested as physical abuse of her son.
Sometimes you are erased before you are given the choice of stating who you are.
The story of Little Dog’s contending with the dual challenges of being a yellow boy in a white place, (Hartford, Connecticut), in the poorer parts, and a gay one, to boot. Coming of age as a gay male teenager, first experiencing sex and a lasting relationship, until well, you’ll see.
Ocean Vuong aged two with his mother and aunt at Philippines refugee camp - image from 2017 Guardian interview
The story of his relationship with his American grandfather, and a secret in that bond.
He writes about Tiger Woods, offering some history of how he came by his name, and wonders why Woods is only very rarely referred to as half-Asian.
There is much consideration of language. In an interview with PBS, Vuong talked about how in Vietnamese culture, farm workers would sing as they worked, merging the action of their bodies with the rhythms of the songs and poems. Other elements contribute to his perspective. Vuong talks about his struggles in school.
Reading was particularly hard, and he suspects that dyslexia runs in his family, though he says now: “I think perhaps the disability helped me a bit, because I write very slowly and see words as objects. I’m always trying to look for words inside words. It’s so beautiful to me that the word laughter is inside slaughter.” - from The Rumpus
He writes of the body as a form of language.
I am writing you from inside a body that used to be yours. Which is to say, I am writing as a son. If we are lucky, the end of the sentence is where we might begin. If we are lucky, something is passed on, another alphabet written in the blood, sinew, and neuron…
And
It’s in these moments, next to you, that I envy words for doing what we can never do—how they can tell all of themselves simply by standing still, simply by being.
Imagine I could lie down beside you and my whole body, every cell, radiates a clear, singular meaning, not so much a writer as a word pressed down beside you.
The sadness of loss permeates. Little Dog has his own losses to grieve, his mother and grandmother far more. But there is recognition, also, that the trials of the past have allowed for some of the good things of the present. This is not a pity party.
Gruesomeness, having to do with macaques, is very far from gorgeous, but is fleeting, and can be seen as an image of the darkest sort of colonialism. There is also LOL humor in the occasional mismatch of cultures.
Vuong can start off a chapter writing about a table, for example, and turn that into a labyrinth, that winds, bends and turns, and somehow winds up back at the table. Very Somebody spoke and I went into a dream.
This is one of the more quotable books you will read. A few:
Freedom, I am told, is nothing but the distance between the hunter and the prey.
or
the past never a fixed and dormant landscape but one that is re-seen. Whether we want to or not, we are traveling in a spiral, we are creating something new from what is gone.
or
I want to insist that our being alive is beautiful enough to be worthy of replication. And so what? So what if all I ever made of my life was more of it?
You get the idea. And plenty more where those came from.
While this is a small book in size, it is neither a slight, nor an easy read. You do not have to be a poet, or a fan of poetry to appreciate the wonderfulness of this book, but it wouldn’t hurt. The stories Ocean Vuong tells are clear and very accessible, but the linguistic gymnastics can leave you needing to uncross your eyes, more than once. But gymnastics are stimulating too, and might loosen up some latent cranial muscles.
We may or may not be gorgeous briefly, or at all, but this book is a work of surpassing beauty, and will remain so forever.
Review first posted – December 13, 2019
Publication dates
==========June 4, 2019 - hardcover
==========June 1, 2021 - Trade paperback
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EXTRA STUFFLinks to the author’s personal, Tumblr and Instagram pages
Vuong is an award-winning poet.
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is his first novel.
Interviews-----The Paris Review – June 5, 2019 - Survival as a Creative Force: An Interview with Ocean Vuong - by Spencer Quong
-----The Guardian – June 9, 2019 - Ocean Vuong: ‘As a child I would ask: What’s napalm?’- by Emma Brockes
-----The Creative Independent – May 16, 2017 - Ocean Vuong on being generous in your work
-----LA Review of Books – Article is from June 2019, but the interview was done in 2017 - Failing Better: A Conversation with Ocean Vuong - by Viet Thanh Nguyen
-----The Guardian – October 3, 2017 - War baby: the amazing story of Ocean Vuong, former refugee and prize-winning poet - by Claire Armistead
Items of Interest-----Excerpt – The New Yorker published this piece from Vuong on May 13, 2017. It is essentially an excerpt from the book. A Letter to My Mother That She Will Never Read
-----The Rumpus – a 2014 piece by Vuong - The Weight of Our Living: On Hope, Fire Escapes, and Visible Desperation
-----The Guardian - April 2, 2022 - Ocean Vuong: ‘I was addicted to everything you could crush into a white powder’ by Lisa Allardice - on his upcoming book, but with relevant intel on the author independent to that
Rating: really liked it
No review. Just a list of adjectives.
Brutal
Raw
Devastating
Beautiful
Incandescent
Stunning
The author didn't write this book; he opened his heart and just let it bleed all over the pages. Reading it cracked mine open and turned me inside out.
Just a sample: "Did you know people get rich off of sadness? I want to meet the millionaire of American sadness. I want to look him in the eye, shake his hand, and say, "Its been an honor to serve my country".
Rating: really liked it
This is such a beautiful book title and it was the title that drew me to read the description and request a copy of it. Not only is the title beautiful, but much of the writing here is as well. It’s described as literary fiction, but a brief look at Ocean Vuong’s bio after I read this book made the biographical nature of the story striking. This letter from a young Vietnamese immigrant to his mother who doesn’t know how to read is raw, impactful, achingly sad, painful to read. It is filled with flashbacks to his childhood when he is bullied at school, physically abused by his mother, protected by his grandmother. It is filled with stories and memories of his mother and grandmother’s past fleeing Vietnam as their pasts become part of his story.
It is about a love between a mother and son. It is a story of a young boy trying to find his place in this country. It’s an intimate portrait of his first relationship as he falls in love with another boy. (A warning to those who might be bothered by explicit sex scenes. You’ll find them here.) The vivid descriptions of the times he spent in the nail salon where his mother worked were eye opening. There’s drug addiction. There are also poignant moments reflecting his love of his mother and grandmother. The stream of consciousness felt a bit disjointed in last part feeling more like random thoughts , and it lacked the cohesiveness of the earlier part for me., thus 4 instead of 5 stars. This book is not for everyone, but it’s worth reading for the beautiful language and amazing portrait of the Vietnamese immigrant experience, for the intimate piece of his heart and soul that this writer shares .
I received an advanced copy of this book from Penguin Press through Edelweiss.
