Review by james1star - On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

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A review by james1star
On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

dark emotional reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

This was truly an exceptional book with harrowing content juxtaposing beautiful, exquisite writing. Vuong being a poet meant his novel debut read this way but he’s also pinpoint in what he wants to say and doesn’t stray from the hard facts of this main character’s existence. It’s a letter from ‘Little Dog’ writing to his mother Rose who doesn’t speak or understand English so you can tell it’s all unashamedly honest. He speaks about a lot: the generational trauma of the Vietnam war on his mum and grandmother Lan, their journey getting to America, the relationship he had with them and child/domestic abuse faced at the hands of his mother, the immigrant experience, a relationship with a boy, Trevor, and in general what is like living in his Queer Vietnamese American body in contemporary USA. The boy he once loved deals with a opioid addiction brought on by taking Oxy and Vuong talks about this drug crisis in America, how it developed and the general destructive, horrible nature of drugs detailing addiction, overdoses and loss of so many young people to it - truly a heartbreaking fact.

I don’t have any negatives to say regarding this book, it’s difficult to read for sure but every part needs to be spoken about. Vuong portrays the story amazingly and many parts will stay with me for a long time. I underlined and saved lots of quotes, some of my absolute faves/most meaningful I’ll share here but be warned of a few spoilers.

‘The monarchs that fly south will not make it back north. Each departure, then, is final. Only their children return; only the future revisits the past.’

And a bit later: ‘Maybe a survivor is the last one to come home, the final monarch that lands on a branch already weighted with ghosts.’

‘Our mother tongue, then, is no mother at all—but an orphan […] to speak in our mother tongue if to speak only partially in Vietnamese, but entirely in war.’

‘…sometimes I don’t know what or who we are. Days I feel like a human being, while other days I feel more like a sound. I touch the world not as myself but as an echo of who I was.’

‘Your hands are hideous—and I hate everything that made them that way. I hate how they are the wreck and reckoning of a dream. […] I hate and love your battered hands for what they can never be.’

‘And because I am your son, I said, “sorry.” Because I am your son, my apology had become, by then, an extension on myself. It was my hello.’

‘I didn’t want to use the Vietnamese word for it—pê-dê—from the French pédé, short for pédéraste. Before the French occupation, our Vietnamese did not have a name for queer bodies—because they were seen, like all bodies, fleshed and of one source—and I didn’t want to introduce this part of me using the epithet for criminals.’ - this whole section exceptional and left be speechless, goosebumps all the way up my arm.

‘To see yourself still yourself is a refuge men who have not been denies cannot know.’

‘In Vietnamese, the word for missing someone and remembering them is the same: nhó. Sometimes, when you ask me over the phone, Con nhó mę knông? I flinch, thinking of you meant, Do you remember me? / I miss you more then i remover you.’

‘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.’

Content Warnings

A review by james1star On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

A review by james1star
On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong