Book Review: On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
3.5 stars
I know my rating is a tad low but I will say this was a very emotional and touching book. I’ve been wanting to read more things related to South East Asia and especially its relationship to the west / the U.S. so I was quite excited to start this book. I think it’s easy to hear of atrocities committed during war and admit that they were terrible and should never happen again but I think it’s much harder as an outsider to truly see the lasting repercussions that carry down for generations. Reading this book allows you to feel for a moment the complexity of growing up in a household that holds so much trauma. The dark moments brought about by horrific memories interspersed with moments of deep human connection and comfort. Family is such a complex thing. Trauma is such a complex thing. And war is such a horrific thing.
As for why I rated it a bit lower: While the prose is quite beautiful and there were some lines that truly struck me, it was also so poetic and flowery that it was interfering with my understanding. While yes, I did feel touched by the story, I would say I only actually understood around 60~70% of what happened in the book. There were so many moments where I found myself sitting there completely lost wondering what is even being conveyed or what is happening in that moment. I found out a couple chapters in that the author is a poet and this was his first novel which explained why this is probably the case. I think maybe to someone more inclined to reading poetry it could be more interpretable but as someone who doesn’t really do poetry much I was struggling.
A few quotes I tabbed while reading (there were more I liked but I didn’t always have my little tabs on me so I needa go back someday lol):
“The cruelest walls are made of glass, Ma.”
“They will tell you that great writing ‘breaks free’ from the political, thereby ‘transcending’ the barriers of difference, uniting people toward universal truths. They’ll say this is achieved through craft above all. Let’s see how it’s made, they’ll say—as if how something is assembled is alien to the impulse that created it. As if the first chair was hammered into existence without considering the human form.”
“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.”
“Let no one mistake us for the fruit of violence—but that violence, having passed through the fruit, failed to spoil it.”
