On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Ocean Vuong Review
“There were colours, Ma. Yes there were colors I felt when I was with him. Not words - but shades, penumbras.”
“Did you ever feel colored-in when a boy found you with his mouth? What if the body, at its best, is only longing for a body? The blood racing to the heart only to be sent back out, filling the routes, the once empty channels, the miles it takes us toward each other. Why did I feel more myself reaching for him, my hand midair, than I did having touched him?”
This book has a beautiful title, one that seems to cram the lessons of a lifetime into a few choice words. And the sentiments and prose of this 242 page book are much the same, flowing around the narrator, Little Dog, as he lyricises his life back to his Vietnamese mother, who cannot read.
I was given this book by my friend with always great recommendations and after hearing it discussed on my favourite podcast The High Low, had high expectations on it’s ‘sublime beauty’. Ocean Vuong undoubtedly has some of the most haunting prose I have ever encountered; the layers of nostalgia built up in this book make you feel like you’re about to get hit by a bus. And then you do, in the relaying of Little Dog’s traumas, over and over again.
But this novel isn’t principally a love story in the romantic sense; it serves more as a love letter to the things that Little Dog both understands and cannot fathom, like his tumultuous relationship with his mother. Gaps in language and how closely language is intertwined with identity is one of the cornerstones of this book, especially in the exploration of its narrator, a Vietnamese-American man. This Guardian profile describes Vuong as a “man with history on his back”; certainly the weight of his Vietnamese heritage and Vietnamese history is one that you can really feel even in the lyrical style of this short novel. War itself is only one footstep away in Little Dog’s family history and his depiction of this leaves a lot for the reader to ponder. One of the opening images in the book, the migration of Monarch butterflies, is eyewatering in it’s succinct beauty on the generational ties of the book.
To return to the title, another one of the most astounding things in this book is it’s reflections on beauty. Lan’s character, the grandmother of the narrator, is one that returns to me many weeks after reading this book in her desperate reaching for her past beautiful self. Explorations of beauty and ageing is captivatingly done in other books, (like Zadie Smith’s On Beauty) and an endlessly interesting bodily concept to me. Ocean Vuong’s gift, his capability throughout the novel to put a thousand musings into one breath of prose, struck me particularly here.
“I asked her what she was thinking. As if waking from a sleepless dream, she answered in a gutted monotone. “I used to be a girl, Little Dog. You know?”
“Okay, Grandma, I know-” But she wasn't listening.
“I used to put a flower in my hair and walk in the sun. After big rain, I walk in the sun. The flower I put on my ear. So wet, so cool.” Her eyes drifted from me. “It’s a stupid thing. To be a girl.” After a while, she turns back to me as if remembering I was there. “You eat yet?”.
I often like books where the beauty is hidden in moments of clarity, those novels where every once in a hundred lines there comes some striking expression of feeling. This book is resolutely not that; it delivers astounding phrases and sentiments from it’s first pages and on almost every other one throughout. Yet it never feels cliched or overdone, perhaps given its length. The only downside I could put on this was that the content is not altogether the happiest. But that does, of course, seem to be the point, as Vuong makes poetry of not only his life, but the chaos of living.
“Where, under the stars, we see at last what we’ve made of each other in the light of long-dead things- and call it good.”
