“Ma. You once told me that memory is a choice. But if you were God, you’d know it’s a flood.”
“On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous” is an epistolary novel by Ocean Vuong, a Vietnamese-American poet and writer, in which the letters are addressed to his mother. The book captures the trauma of immigration from war ridden places with profound imagery and subtle writing but tends to get repetitive. Voung describes certain emotions in an extraordinary way which tugs at your every string of heart but still falls flat for the major part of the book. It is an ordinary book with glimpses of the extraordinary.
It follows the narration of a boy in his early 20s writing letters to his illiterate mother who can’t read or speak the English language. It follows the timeline which explores the family history intersecting with Vietnam war and at the same time delving into narrator’s gay relationship with Trevor, a boy he works with at a barn. The story is majorly a diaspora experience of a boy, his relationship with his mother and his encounter with sexuality and masculinity. It makes a to and fro oscillation between the time of the Vietnam war and his journey to become a writer in America.
It reads like a ballad mourning a loss, a homeland lost, young love and flood of ‘memories’ screaming of war. Although, this book had me getting lumps in my throat but most of the time felt like pages are getting filled with unnecessary prose, it’s like you are summarizing a heartbreaking verse you just wrote but failing to put into words — unnecessary in the sense that it’s too typical and ordinary — a gay love story we’ve read too many times and immigration story which could’ve been told much clearly. It could have easily passed for one of those hotel room books with a big font and less content and still would have had the same effect on the readers.
Overall, it is a good read if you are looking for hard hitting highlights and don’t really care about storytelling. Yes, the story will move you, make you cry even but to reach those places you will have to traverse endless pages which you wish didn’t exist in the book.
