Reviews with content warning for Grief - On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“You’re a mother, Ma. You’re also a monster. But so am I—which is why I can’t turn away from you. Which is why I have taken god’s loneliest creation and put you inside it.”

okay. deep breaths everyone (talking to myself).

i don't even know where or how to begin this review/complete emotional word barf because i think this novel just changed something in me.

the whole thing is just gorgeous and poetic prose that just slams into your brain over and over again. this is definitely not an easy read—with both heavy, HEAVY content and dense narratives that may take a couple read-throughs to digest.

"Our mother tongue, then, is no mother at all—but an orphan. Our Vietnamese a time capsule, a mark of where your education ended, ashed.”

touching on themes and conflicts of diaspora, culture and how it intersects with queerness, masculinity, and what it means to grow up with all odds against you, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is, probably, a perfect depiction of the common migrant/first-gen experience. it took me a while to finish this book. it physically hurt me to continue reading after i've read one section that hit a LITTTTTLE too close to home. i've never read a book that captured experiences i thought were unique to me before. having these familiar thoughts and experiences articulated and weaved so nicely within these pages was definitely an amazing feeling. i've never felt less alone than when vuong described his complicated relationship with his mother, or how someone, namely your own mother, can both love you unconditionally yet completely despise you.

i noticed other reviews criticizing the language in the book saying that it was unnecessary to the storytelling, but honestly, i loved it. Vuong mentions repeatedly how English was his weapon—it became a tool in which was used to culturally assimilate into a world that will always see him as an outsider. and that HURT me. he's telling his story in the language that he can. it's ... a really specific experience, i think. incredibly hard to articulate into words that would make sense for anyone who has never had that experience. i think his prose was absolutely necessary in driving home that idea at the beginning of his orphaned Vietnamese. it's ironic, almost, how one's mother tongue can gradually dissolve into close to nothing. a fair sacrifice made to survive in this cruel world, no?

“Sometimes being offered tenderness feels like the very proof that you’ve been ruined.”

it took me a good while to adjust to the pace and formatting. Vuong jumps between timelines often, and is a bit unconventional. HOWEVER! i do like his choice of these abrupt switches. it resembles how one would reencounter memories and ghosts of the past, and it really help me immerse myself in all the narratives Vuong laid out, whether it be when he was 6, 14, 20.

a lot of internal monologues and thoughts were braided into the rich prose, which made me think "wow, this guy really is a great poet." it's done pretty effortlessly, and i noticed Vuong tends to leave section conclusions open-ended, either with a (seemingly) passing thought, or a vague statement. over time, it could be a bit frustrating to not have a clear answer, but does anyone have an answer anyway? is there even an answer to these happenings in life?

“Afterward, lying next to me with his face turned away, he cried skillfully in the dark. The way boys do.”

i really, really appreciated Vuong's complete honesty here. it helped to match the current speaker (the different ages) to the scene. i think it helped to emphasize that, yes, that is a young boy experiencing these things, and not a young boy's thought process through the mind of an adult, if you know what i mean.

grief in three different ways was shown pretty perfectly. 1. grief with never having your mother's unconditional acceptance. 2. the grief that comes with being a queer man

Spoiler

and losing the one who was supposed to be beside you for just a little while longer

. 3. grief with a grandparent that raised you through stories. and god, did all of them hurt deeply.

this novel also got me thinking just how differently a mother-son and mother-daughter relationship can be. i think i'm feeling an additional grief after that realization.

“Maybe in the next life we’ll meet each other for the first time—believing in everything but the harm we’re capable of.”

above is probably my favourite quote (of many great ones) in the entire novel. this was a difficult, but amazing read. this is a story of "what could've been," of "what if," and makes you think what little is left of that little boy's naivety and hope for a world free of hate, violence, and bloodshed.

Content Warnings

saucy_bookdragon's review against another edition

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emotional reflective sad slow-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

3.0

The prose is gorgeous indeed and the book reads like an experiment in styles and a flexing of Vuong's craft. On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is better described as a stream of conscious than an actual story, lacking a plot which isn't a complaint, some books like this don't need one.

But I do wish this could've had more prevalent character arcs as they all felt somewhat static which hampered the emotional impact for me. Little Dog feels less like a protagonist and more like a narrator. I did find his mother to be well realized though and she's arguably the real protagonist, despite the fact there are points where the narrative/stream of conscious drifts away from her.

Content Warnings

_jasper_394's review against another edition

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emotional funny reflective sad medium-paced

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

4.75

Content Warnings

ellornaslibrary's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional hopeful reflective sad 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? Yes

5.0

It hurts, but the writing is so beautiful. . .

And when I've had time to process this raw, emotional, beautiful read a little more I'll add to this review.

Content Warnings

astrangewind's review

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dark emotional reflective sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

Oh, I love books written by poets. Ocean Vuong's attention to detail - to the smallest pieces that define human existence - add color to an otherwise difficult world. On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous flows from one chapter, one paragraph, one sentence to the next with such captivating language, such vivid imagery.

My one issue with this book, and with Vuong as a poet, is that the writing sometimes abstracts itself so far away that it is nearly impossible to tell what is happening. And maybe the point is to blur the lines between the real and the not, like between a dream and a memory - but it's damn hard to read.

Content Warnings

mirandyli's review

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emotional reflective medium-paced

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

5.0

Beautifully written and will probably make you cry.

Content Warnings

mepresley's review

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dark emotional reflective sad slow-paced

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

5.0

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is brief and gorgeous, full of pain and violence and love, like a human life. Told almost in a series of vignettes, memories pieced together with reflection, the story Little Dog gives us is presented out of chronological order but with perfect resonance. It’s a love letter to his deeply flawed mother and his equally deeply flawed first boyfriend, Trevor,

Spoiler

neither of whom will ever read it because the former is illiterate & never became totally fluent in English and the latter because he is dead

, filled with the pain inflicted on him, but equally with the tenderness of flawed, beautiful people doing their best to escape what cages them, what hunts them.

Little Dog narrates the war in Vietnam that shaped his family, that he once thought birthed them, before he realized that they were born of beauty.

Spoiler

He shows images of his grandmother, Lan, in war-torn Vietnam, facing soldiers with guns while holding the infant Rose--his mother--in a bundle, their lives spared, probably, because Rose was more white than yellow, her father an American soldier. We glimpse Rose and Paul falling in love--Paul, the man who chose to be Rose's father and Little Dog's grandfather, though Lan, forced to work as a prostitute to survive during the war, was already pregnant when they met. Little Dog's father hovers at the edges of the narrative, a man who beat his mother and was carried off in a police car, who brought his wages home in coins that made them feel rich, who took them to KFC with a coupon given to them by a cashier at Goodwill.

He shows us his childhood, filled with a mother who was overworked and whose job at the nail salon taught her to say sorry as part of her identity, part of her livelihood, lessons Little Dog carried into his own first job, working underage among illegal immigrants harvesting tobacco, and paid under the table. A childhood colored by his schizophrenic Lan, as with the night that he awoke to fireworks that she thought were an air raid, and the two of them crouched together, hiding from the enemy, but also as with the day that she spotted purple flowers across a fence separating the path from the highway, sending Little Dog over to gather them, helping him back across, creating a windowsill garden & a secret that bonded them, Lan's finger to her lips as she told Rose they found the flowers discarded by a florist, the night he came home after having penetrative sex with Trevor for the first time, wet from the river they bathed in, and Lan told him that he had been on a long journey but they wouldn't speak of it so that the pirates couldn't find him.

A childhood shaped around his mother's pain, her abuse of Little Dog, but also the two of them walking the mall with squares of chocolate that felt decadent, filling a cart at Goodwill on yellow tag day when everything was an additional 50% off, reaching across a divide to touch each other and share truths even when they cut--in the bakery, when Little Dog comes out to his mother and she tells him that he had a brother, aborted before he was born, because they could not afford to feed him.

A young adulthood of choosing his own pain, in the form of Trevor, who could not accept his own homosexuality, and who was himself broken by an abusive father, a culture who taught him to hate himself and deny his own existence as a gay man, an addiction to Oxycontin turned heroin, stemming from an ankle injury when he was just 14 years old, dying of an overdose at 22.

The narrative ends with Trevor's death and its aftermath interspersed with Lan's death and its aftermath, with Little Dog's goodbye to his first doomed love echoed by Paul's graveside goodbye via video chat to his own doomed first love, the former sundered by preventable addiction and the latter by war & the machinations of his family.

Throughout the text, Little Dog returns again and again in powerful ways to a few animal images: the monarch butterflies and their yearly migration; macaque monkeys, whose heads were broken open while they were still alive so their brains could be ingested as a cure for impotence; baby calves kept in close cages for their entire short lives so that their meat would be more tender and delicious; and buffalo, an entire herd, stampeding over a cliff, one after the other. Seeing the image on TV, Rose asks Little Dog why the buffalo do that, watching those before them fall to their deaths and doing the same thing, a question that Little Dog, in turn, poses to Trevor, who tells him that it's not a choice they make, just nature. Vuong chooses to leave us with only this answer, which is also the answer of why people repeat the same patterns, intergenerational trauma in action, friends dying by the handfuls of ODs. Googling the question after finishing the book, I find that the true answer is just as perfect for the novel: buffalo stampede when threatened and Native Americans harnessed this knowledge to kill the buffalo in droves. Like the Vietnamese immigrants in this story, like the forgotten poor of the neighborhood where Little Dog grew up--and so many identical neighborhoods (places where people don't ask "how are you?" because the responses are already known and overflowing with loss and pain and unmet needs, but instead "what's good?" because good, however small it is, can be good enough, because freedom is always relative, and calves are the most free in the short moments between their cage being opened & being led to the slaughter), like queer people, the buffalo run off the cliff because they are hunted.

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