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A review by corinnekeener
On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong
3.0
We read and discussed On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous on episode 52 of The Bookstore Podcast. You can hear more thoughts wherever you get your podcasts.
It's difficult to talk about this story without just stating plainly that it is sort of a mess of style. The first section is told in tiny vignettes, which while beautiful and often very memorable, also don't exactly add up to a cohesive story. The second section is told more traditionally in it's narrative structure, but the poetic writing is sometimes so thick I had to read sections over and over and still never understand them.
"I drove my face into him as if into a climate, the autobiography of a season."
That sounds gorgeous, but means nothing. You don't push things into climates. A climate is huge. It spans geographies, time - sometimes centuries, it's practically theoretical in that sense. For the life of me, I don't know what this is supposed to mean. For as many sentences as there are that actually do communicate something, there's one that feels painfully overworked like this.
But at the center of this often-beautiful-sometimes-nonsense writing is a story that I really loved. It's an immigration story, a family saga, and a first love. It often verges on bleak, but also gives a glimpse to the reason we hold on to one another. The first section, written in small vignettes, is probably the most effective for the overall patchwork quality of the novel.
People are going to be talking about this one for a bit. I won't be surprised to see it on year end lists. While it didn't totally work for me, I can see where they're coming from.
It's difficult to talk about this story without just stating plainly that it is sort of a mess of style. The first section is told in tiny vignettes, which while beautiful and often very memorable, also don't exactly add up to a cohesive story. The second section is told more traditionally in it's narrative structure, but the poetic writing is sometimes so thick I had to read sections over and over and still never understand them.
"I drove my face into him as if into a climate, the autobiography of a season."
That sounds gorgeous, but means nothing. You don't push things into climates. A climate is huge. It spans geographies, time - sometimes centuries, it's practically theoretical in that sense. For the life of me, I don't know what this is supposed to mean. For as many sentences as there are that actually do communicate something, there's one that feels painfully overworked like this.
But at the center of this often-beautiful-sometimes-nonsense writing is a story that I really loved. It's an immigration story, a family saga, and a first love. It often verges on bleak, but also gives a glimpse to the reason we hold on to one another. The first section, written in small vignettes, is probably the most effective for the overall patchwork quality of the novel.
People are going to be talking about this one for a bit. I won't be surprised to see it on year end lists. While it didn't totally work for me, I can see where they're coming from.