I wondered about what to write as an introduction for this book, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong. I wondered for a long time, wrote some things, hit backspace, wrote again – and finally decided to keep the format of what it was originally intended for. I do a series of videos over on my BookTube channel where every month my subscribers pick a book from among 4-5 books for me to read, vlog, and review for them. And On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous was the Subscriber Pick for the month of April 2024.
I did this in vlog format and I will include this under a new, Reading Blog series here on the blog where I take you through my thoughts in the order that I had them. I don’t know how this is going to go, but I think it’s time to try new things here on the blog. So let’s go!
If you’d like to watch my reading vlog instead, here’s the link: On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous Vlog on YouTube. 😄
I had heard amazing things about this book, topmost on which list is that it was poetic and lyrical – which I can attest to be true. I’d also seen many people talk unfavorably about the prose, which they say is too purple to be effective – which I can also attest to be true. So at the beginning of the vlog, I wondered which of these groups of people I was about to join. Would I find it to be poetic and lyrical? Or would I think of this much-loved book as too purple for my taste? And I found out exactly what I thought of it.
Now a quick recap on what On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is about:
The Goodreads blurb tells us that this book is a letter that a son writes to his mother in which he puts in everything he has never told her and takes us through his life, his mother’s life, and his grandmother’s life, the history of which can be traced back to Vietnam. The blurb also says that “it is also a brutally honest exploration of race, class, and masculinity.”
Initial Thoughts:
The first 20% of the book, I did so many back and forths, I didn’t understand what to think of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous because the purple prose is present present and in some places, is super, super annoying.
As against what the blurb said, I felt like it is more like a series of disjointed letters rather than one letter, within which were disjointed paragraphs, within which were disjointed sentences, much like those nested Matryoshka dolls. It’s also more of a stream-of-consciousness type of writing that’s being poured into these letters, with the author jumping from one place to the next in a way that’s absolutely, delightfully poetic one moment, and mind-numbingly, mind-scratchingly annoying the next.
I mean, how do you go from talking about a woman peeing to talking about the brain of a macaque, even if that macaque is IN the story at this time?
I also didn’t like how it felt like the author’s trying too, too hard to turn this into a novel-in-verse. In that endeavor, he ends up bringing in disconnected (there’s that word again), disjointed metaphors in a bid to connect two brilliant but disparate dots. And at this point, I couldn’t really decide if I liked the writing or not because it was so vague. I felt like a pendulum, swinging from one end of the like-meter to the other, liking the book at one time and wanting to break my head over the next.
Thoughts @ 40%:
I was even more confused about On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous at 40%! I swear, that ping ponging like a pendulum got so much worse, but then again, it was swinging more towards the favorable end of the radar.
The author continues to take us through the life experiences of the main character, Little Dog’s grandmother, mother, and Little Dog himself. There’s the PTSD from the Vietnam War and how it manifests itself, them moving to America, the things his mother went through, the jobs she did for a living, the family’s history, and bits and pieces of racist America, the history of this racism and its remnants in the present.
Either way, I still found myself softening towards this book. I might not be a full fan at this point and I wouldn’t even be able to say that I like it. But I do see the appeal and I must say that my interest in the book and where Ocean Vuong was about to take it, was definitely piqued. And yet, I knew I was going to proceed with caution, because we know what happens when I run forward like an excited battering ram.
Thoughts @ 67%:
Finishing part 2 of the book brought me to the 67% mark and I was, at this point, firmly behind what I said in my last update. This book felt like such a confused mish-mash of so many different things and writing styles that I was constantly in limbo because I couldn’t understand what I should have been feeling towards it. At one point, I was scrunching my face because the writing felt so pretentious to me. And at others, I was nodding vigorously either because I was relating to something or because I found the writing to be very beautiful.
But at no point did either facet of the writing surprise me because I’d gotten a read on the author’s writing and knew that both were going to hit me out of nowhere, forcing me to take a step back and acknowledge them.
It’s a strange mix, this book, because it tries to be so much at once. There’s poetry, obviously; then there’s historical fiction in the form of stories of the main character’s mother and grandmother, and also in the way he recounts his first relationship; there’s contemporary; and the way the author veers off into tangents, each seeming to have no connection with the next at first glance, gives it a stream-of-consciousness feeling.
But to be fair to it, it never claimed to be anything else. This isn’t one of those books that says one thing on the cover and turns out to be something else. Trust me, I know bunches of such books. This blurb told us exactly what to expect. And yet, I cribbed and whinged as I read it because even if I was getting exactly what I was told, the lack of structure and clarity, along with the whiplash of the U-turns at every page, still stung and annoyed me to no end.
But I wanted to see if the last 32% redeemed On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous for me, although I was also thinking that any hope of redemption at this point in the book was futile. Still kept my fingers crossed though.
Final Update:
I finished reading On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous late in the night and I was and still am, pissed at the book. Even after all these weeks, I firmly stand behind all my previous opinions because though I hoped for the writing to ease up, it just wound progressively tighter into itself. And I’m here, trying to pry the writing open to see into its depths, to understand what he’s saying, but nope.
In the end, the word I think of when I think of this book is the one I’ve been saying since the very beginning: PRETENTIOUS.
I felt like a pendulum swinging back and forth between two ends – one, a beautiful, poetic wordscape, and the other, an annoying, closed-off word dump – both of which are present in equal measure and both of which have an almost equal influence on my final opinion of the book. I mean, I have way too many problems with this book, which are mostly my issues with the style.
I realized quickly when I started on the last part that the author uses the word ‘warp’ every time it rains and he has to describe the sight/scene outside. It gets old real quick and isn’t exactly as poetic as it is intended to be. The true time warp actually comes when the author himself jumps from fighting back tears in one sentence to considering the stars and wondering how anyone could call the night dark in the next. It feels like a figurative whip lashing across your face that somehow feels real.
And then, the author writing like he has already introduced every character he is talking about, as if we’re very well-versed with their behavior, is something that I’ve had a problem with since Margaret Atwood. Presumption isn’t a great look when you’re writing a story, when you’re telling the reader a story.
There are some things that the author leaves till about 75% in, making it feel like a last-ditch attempt to keep the reader invested. “What’s next?” “Oh it is this cliché.” It just feels like a cheap or lazy trick just to make the story end heavy.
I don’t know if I have mentioned the macaque but every time I think of this book, I think of the macaque scene, which is so gory that it makes me sick every time. Was it necessary though? Is my question.
In the end, there was one thought that stuck with me, which was that it’s good to subvert opinions and expectations and realities. It’s good to subvert structures. That is true when you respect the reader enough to take them along with you on the journey. But this text works itself like a jigsaw puzzle, uncoupling when it wishes, joining in when it wishes – keeping the reader in the dark about its meaning, which is hidden under layers and layers of the purplest of proses, one that trumps even This is How You Lose the Time War.
Okay, that’s taking it a little too far because that one is way too much more than this one. But On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous feels very self-important and I don’t mean it in a good way. There’s an underlying feeling of I-am-better-because-I-use-big-and-complicated-words-twisted-into-complicated-or-reverse-metaphors that got under my skin way too much for my liking.
My comment towards the end was literally: PLEASE! Enough. Stop. I beg of you.
I just didn’t like this book and I thought it was pretentious. But I also do grudgingly acknowledge the beauty of some of its parts. Only, those few parts weren’t enough to salvage this book from the depths of my unfavorable opinion.
“I know. It’s not fair that the word ‘favorable’ is trapped inside ‘unfavorable’.”
So that was my reading blog for On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong.
Have you read this book? If you have, what did you think of it? Let me know in the comments below. I’d love to hear from you!
If you’d like to watch my reading vlog instead, here’s the link: On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous Vlog on YouTube.
I’ll see you in my next blog post.
Until next time, keep reading, keep watching, and add melodrama to your life! ❤
The Melodramatic Bookworm 