On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
Ocean Vuong, 2019
296 pages
Read in 2026.09
Check the synopsis and details on amazon.com
🔽 Summary and quick note 🔽
★★★★★+ A letter to the protagonist's illiterate mother, a confession he can only make because his mother is unlikely to read it. He explores the beauty and the tenderness in the ugly impoverished world. It's not the sadness but the tenderness that grabs you.
🔽 Book review 🔽
There are not many books that make you (or me at least) cry, and very rarely, they make you cry not because of the sad story or beautiful plot, but because you get hurt by the honest words.
It's written as a letter to the protagonist's illiterate mother, who is a mixed race Vietnamese refugee to the US.
Little Dog, the protagonist, came to the US when he was small and he learns English at school, but his "mother tongue" Vietnamese is also elementary because their family spoke in broken Vietnamese - the inability to articulate is haunting, something we are forced to learn when living abroad.
And in this book, the protagonist (and the author) writes down the tender, honest feelings using the acquired language and it creates the magic.
It's a confession in a way, a confession he can only make because his illiterate mother is unlikely to read it.
Vuong, the author, is a poet, and is gay and has moved to the US escaping a war, and the US, his former enemy and now his home, is to be blamed for destroying his childhood and for the trauma.
That background is similar to Akbah, I only very recently read "Martyr!" so I cannot help but comparing them.
They both talk of their mothers, Akbah talks about the missing mother, and Vuong the abusive and abused mother.
The relationship to their mother can be described with one word, pain.
Respectively they are hurt, the mothers carry the pain, and put the pain on their sons.
The sons don't forgive the mothers, but they just embrace them as they are, with the pain they pass on.
They obviously question masculinity too, but being immigrants, their identities are also not so concrete, so both books pushes away the sense of security and certainty.
But On Earth, the writing is calmer than Akbah's energetic writing.
Little Dog is calmly explaining the unexplainable to his mother, his romance with the drug addict in his teenage years, the life with hopelessness, the 3 women of his family, how he sees the world and how he explores the beauty and the tenderness in the ugly impoverished world.
The book also rejects to be dramatic or tragic, his words are not calculating or clever, but so plain, sensitive and fragile.
It's not the sadness but the tenderness that grabs you as read it, because, we still manage to be gorgeous.
🔽 Related pages 🔽
🔽 Where to buy / Summary and more info 🔽
●●● Amazon.com (US) ●●●
On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous: A Novel
