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A review by writingcaia
On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.75
A son’s letter to his illiterate mother. A letter he knows she won’t read but still hopes she does, so she that knows his love, his anger, his forgiveness for her, his secrets and turmoil of emotions.
This is his story, a half Vietnamese American gay boy, with a ptsd (trauma induced) violent mother, a demented but so wise grandmother, an absent father, living in a bad neighbourhood, and him falling in love with a “white trash” addict boy. It is also about flashes of his mother and grandmother’s lives, the Vietnam War and the brutality, and extreme violence and destruction it imposed on the Vietnamese, like his mother and grandmother.
Like the lives of those we see through his eyes, his is hard and sad, but with moments of genuine enchantment and delight, the little things he treasures, specially when he’s a little boy, but then there’s the love, which is strange and hard too, a homophobic gay boy, an addict, but there’s still love, and I risk saying it reads as if he was if not the love of his life one of.
Just writing this so long after I’ve finished the book, I feel like crying, it digs deep and latches, it’s moving and emotional, crude and candid, no filters only vivid truth.
It’s really a tale about the consequences of war in second and third generations, about racism, about coming out as gay, about addiction and how it can kill off a generation in poor countries/neighbourhoods, and about love and understanding for a hard mother.
The book reads almost as a poem, lyric and entrancing, as it is harsh and brutal in its words, moving like a wave, advancing and receding, although mostly moving temporarily forward in his life.
I think this is a book that will become a classic of our times since it touches with such candor on so many relevant and 20th century important moments and circumstances, and the lives of those born in the last decades of it in the US of A.
This is his story, a half Vietnamese American gay boy, with a ptsd (trauma induced) violent mother, a demented but so wise grandmother, an absent father, living in a bad neighbourhood, and him falling in love with a “white trash” addict boy. It is also about flashes of his mother and grandmother’s lives, the Vietnam War and the brutality, and extreme violence and destruction it imposed on the Vietnamese, like his mother and grandmother.
Like the lives of those we see through his eyes, his is hard and sad, but with moments of genuine enchantment and delight, the little things he treasures, specially when he’s a little boy, but then there’s the love, which is strange and hard too, a homophobic gay boy, an addict, but there’s still love, and I risk saying it reads as if he was if not the love of his life one of.
Just writing this so long after I’ve finished the book, I feel like crying, it digs deep and latches, it’s moving and emotional, crude and candid, no filters only vivid truth.
It’s really a tale about the consequences of war in second and third generations, about racism, about coming out as gay, about addiction and how it can kill off a generation in poor countries/neighbourhoods, and about love and understanding for a hard mother.
The book reads almost as a poem, lyric and entrancing, as it is harsh and brutal in its words, moving like a wave, advancing and receding, although mostly moving temporarily forward in his life.
I think this is a book that will become a classic of our times since it touches with such candor on so many relevant and 20th century important moments and circumstances, and the lives of those born in the last decades of it in the US of A.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Animal cruelty, Animal death, Child abuse, Drug abuse, Drug use, Fire/Fire injury, Sexual content, and Violence
Moderate: Addiction, Alcoholism, Car accident, Excrement, Homophobia, and War