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On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
A Novel
eBook - 2019
An instant New York Times Bestseller!
Longlisted for the 2019 National Book Award for Fiction, the Carnegie Medal in Fiction, the 2019 Aspen Words Literacy Prize, and the PEN/Hemingway Debut Novel Award
Shortlisted for the 2019 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize
Winner of the 2019 New England Book Award for Fiction!
Named one of the most anticipated books of 2019 by Vulture, Entertainment Weekly, Buzzfeed, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, Oprah.com, Huffington Post, The A.V. Club, Nylon, The Week, The Rumpus, The Millions, The Guardian, Publishers Weekly, and more.
“A lyrical work of self-discovery that’s shockingly intimate and insistently universal…Not so much briefly gorgeous as permanently stunning.” —Ron Charles, The Washington Post
Poet Ocean Vuong’s debut novel is a shattering portrait of a family, a first love, and the redemptive power of storytelling
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family’s history that began before he was born — a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam — and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation. At once a witness to the fraught yet undeniable love between a single mother and her son, it is also a brutally honest exploration of race, class, and masculinity. Asking questions central to our American moment, immersed as we are in addiction, violence, and trauma, but undergirded by compassion and tenderness, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is as much about the power of telling one’s own story as it is about the obliterating silence of not being heard.
With stunning urgency and grace, Ocean Vuong writes of people caught between disparate worlds, and asks how we heal and rescue one another without forsaking who we are. The question of how to survive, and how to make of it a kind of joy, powers the most important debut novel of many years.
Named a Best Book of the Year by:
GQ, Kirkus Reviews, Booklist, Library Journal, TIME, Esquire, The Washington Post, Apple, Good Housekeeping, The New Yorker, The New York Public Library, Elle.com, The Guardian, The A.V. Club, NPR, Lithub, Entertainment Weekly, Vogue.com, The San Francisco Chronicle, Mother Jones, Vanity Fair, The Wall Street Journal Magazine and more!
Longlisted for the 2019 National Book Award for Fiction, the Carnegie Medal in Fiction, the 2019 Aspen Words Literacy Prize, and the PEN/Hemingway Debut Novel Award
Shortlisted for the 2019 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize
Winner of the 2019 New England Book Award for Fiction!
Named one of the most anticipated books of 2019 by Vulture, Entertainment Weekly, Buzzfeed, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, Oprah.com, Huffington Post, The A.V. Club, Nylon, The Week, The Rumpus, The Millions, The Guardian, Publishers Weekly, and more.
“A lyrical work of self-discovery that’s shockingly intimate and insistently universal…Not so much briefly gorgeous as permanently stunning.” —Ron Charles, The Washington Post
Poet Ocean Vuong’s debut novel is a shattering portrait of a family, a first love, and the redemptive power of storytelling
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family’s history that began before he was born — a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam — and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation. At once a witness to the fraught yet undeniable love between a single mother and her son, it is also a brutally honest exploration of race, class, and masculinity. Asking questions central to our American moment, immersed as we are in addiction, violence, and trauma, but undergirded by compassion and tenderness, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is as much about the power of telling one’s own story as it is about the obliterating silence of not being heard.
With stunning urgency and grace, Ocean Vuong writes of people caught between disparate worlds, and asks how we heal and rescue one another without forsaking who we are. The question of how to survive, and how to make of it a kind of joy, powers the most important debut novel of many years.
Named a Best Book of the Year by:
GQ, Kirkus Reviews, Booklist, Library Journal, TIME, Esquire, The Washington Post, Apple, Good Housekeeping, The New Yorker, The New York Public Library, Elle.com, The Guardian, The A.V. Club, NPR, Lithub, Entertainment Weekly, Vogue.com, The San Francisco Chronicle, Mother Jones, Vanity Fair, The Wall Street Journal Magazine and more!
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SPL_Shauna
Oct 30, 2019
Autobiographical novels can be self-indulgent, dishy, or fraught. With such familiar source material, authors can wind up in the weeds, too close to the story to make a coherent narrative of it. But when these novels work, they can be gorgeous feats, giving readers searing glimpses into lives they’ve never imagined, or showing someone who needs it a slice of their own life in print. Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is absolutely the latter.
With the novel framed as a letter to his mother, Vuong’s character, Little Dog, follows a trajectory that closely matches his own life growing up in Hartford, Connecticut. He’s child of a Vietnamese mother – whose own story is heartbreaking – and a father who barely exists in the narrative beyond a sense of distant terror, now absent. They arrive in Hartford during Little Dog’s early years; his mother works in a nail salon, and tries to make the best life she can for them, plus her mother Lan. It’s an unrequited narrative, in that Vuong’s narrator is certain his mother is unable to span the emotional and cultural distance required to read the book he wrote her, even as he writes it.
Vuong does much more than recount the challenges of coming to America as a young child, in a family scarred by the traumas of war. He uses achingly beautiful language to try to span the distance he feels between his mother, aunt, and grandmother, still so rooted in their Vietnamese memories and culture, and his own life as a gay man fluent in American and Vietnamese culture, but not completely at home in either.
Vuong’s prose shifts between imagining his mother’s and grandmother’s lives in Vietnam, and parsing his own life, from his childhood, through to his first romance with an all-American, foot-ball loving boy he meets picking tobacco one summer in high school, and finally into his early adult years. The novel is permeated by a sense of unbelonging: his own, his family’s, but also that of the young people he bonds with in Hartford and New York City who feel left behind and broken, and begin to fall to the opioid epidemic.
Vuong’s prose folds outward prismically, his honed poet’s voice lending layers of understanding to situations too often given superficial treatment in the news or social media. For readers who love to scan a text for different readings, this book is weighty and melancholic, stunning in how it unravels to tease more meanings. While anyone who gets most of their enjoyment from a tight plot may find themselves frustrated, those who engage with rich language and complex characters may find their book of the year.
A letter from a young man to his illiterate mother, 'On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous' follows the narrator, Little Dog, as he comes of age on the East Coast with his Vietnamese refugee mother and grandmother. The novel chronicles Little Dog's experiences as he explores his identity, as well as the narratives of his mother and grandparents in their native Vietnam.
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ArapahoeMaryA
Jan 06, 2020
All freedom is relative—you know too well—and sometimes it’s no freedom at all, but simply the cage widening far away from you, the bars abstracted with distance but still there, as when they “free” wild animals into nature preserves only to contain them yet again by larger borders. But I took it anyway, that widening. Because sometimes not seeing the bars is enough.
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Add a CommentThrough the son's letters to his mother readers learn of his life growing up with her, a traumatized woman lucky enough to be living in North America and his grandmother, whose own story is told. The revelations articulate the horrors perpetrated onto the average Vietnamese in a poetic style that may not suit everyone. I didn't finsih it, I suppose there was too much back and forth and I was hoping for a story with a plot. This author shows great promise if he can marry his prose to a plot.
I'm glad the author found language(s) to deal with his pain, but the PTSD, schizophrenia, drugs and other issues the family dealt with, were too much for me to read more than a few chapters.
I've been thinking about how to put into words how I feel about this book. Sometimes the writing was spot on and the book rode a 5-star wave. Sometimes, I struggled through it, but not because the writing was bad. On the contrary, it was beautiful, but beautiful prose can only go so far on its own. For example:
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“A page, turning, is a wing lifted with no twin, and therefore no flight. And yet we are moved.”
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I don't really know what that means. Yes, I understand, but didn't know why it was there.
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I will say this: On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is fearless and beautifully crafted. Each word was polished to shine, and then polished some more. There are times the author drops the ball, but for the most part, it is the book's greatest strength as well as its greatest weakness. It's not a linear story—instead of protagonists you follow from beginning to end, the story is told in fragments, jumping back and forth between timelines and states of mind—but I enjoyed piecing everything together.
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Overall, I would say I enjoyed the reading experience. It was raw and tender at the same time, beautifully written words that both enriched and took away from the narrative. I found myself skimming some parts and reflecting deeply on others. I expected nothing when I started, but expected more when I finished. Would I recommend it? I would say give it a try if you're looking for something different, but keep your expectations in check. It is what it is—nothing more, nothing less. And maybe that's the beauty of it.
On Earth is one of those books that makes a hopeful writer less hopeful, less worthy. Vuong’s poet side is evident in every paragraph, every description, every observation. This is a book you binge, both wanting to read the next chapter but hoping it never ends. Im almost guilty starting a new book but I’m eager to find one that brings me the same joy and melancholy that this book did.
This is a book you savor. Vuong writes this story as a letter to his mom. His words on each page beautiful and powerful. I stopped many times to re-read a sentence, a paragraph. The writing is not briefly gorgeous-it is gorgeous from start to finish. This is not a happy book, but a hopeful one.
Vuong’s writing left me stunned. More poem than novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous had me by the end of the first page. I can’t think of the last time I read something with such a beautifully hypnotic narration. The story Vuong tells is grounded and genuine. He explores themes of family, of trauma, and of sexuality in a coming of age story that would make even Harper Lee jealous.
While not widely relatable, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous strikes a chord with its reader. I recommend it to anyone looking to branch into more artistic styles of writing or works by LGBTQ authors. @Bowie of the Teen Review Board at the Hamilton Public Library
Reads like poetry at times, which makes sense. I enjoyed the perspective bit did not always connect with the imagery or analogy
Beautiful, sensual and I want to say, eviscerating. He deserves the accolades.
This is unlike most books that I have read. It is almost a diary. I didn't like the sexual parts and skipped those. It is very sad and disturbing in a lot of ways. It seems to be written by someone who spends a lot of time in his own head.
This one was a heart-breaker for me. By that, I mean it includes some of the most brilliant and evocative prose I've ever read and Vuong conjures scenes and personalities in words the way Van Gogh
did with paint. But, as with Van Gogh, I'm left with a sense of his creation process being painful. The heartbreak began to take over as the novel essentially self-destructs; his protagonists (almost all of them!!) spiral into various forms of self-mutilation. No one is getting out of here alive and in full possession of their faculties. Ocean Vuong is a writer who holds nothing back: a modern-day, gay, overheated version of the German romantics — "The Sorrows of Young Werther" comes to mind. This is not for the faint of heart.