Vuong’s writing about nail salons, and the way mothers raised their children in them, is moving and rarely less than excellent. “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous” is, at the same time, filled with showy, affected writing, with forced catharses and swollen quasi-profundities. After leaving her first husband from an arranged marriage, she meets an American serviceman named Paul and marries him. “When does a war end?” Little Dog wonders. The author Ocean Vuong was first published as a poet, and the poetry in this novel—present in the language, in the images and ideas—is unforgettable. He describes himself as “twenty-eight years old, 5ft 4in tall, 112lbs, handsome at exactly three angles and deadly from everywhere else.” As a child, he frequently experiences physical abuse by his mother. There are enough of these that this novel’s keel can lodge in the mud.

An Amazon Best Book of June 2019:There is an immediacy to On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous that almost feels unique. [1] An epistolary novel, it is written in the form of a letter from a Vietnamese American son to his illiterate mother. Flickering between wartime Vietnam and early thousands Hartford, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous explores themes of race, nationality, gender, and the question of what constitutes a family. And yet we are moved.”, “There’s Mozzicato’s on Franklin, where I had my first cannoli. She marries a white American soldier and gives birth to a child, although the father of the child is most likely another man. Moreover, she experiences domestic violence for a brief period of time. [19], "On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong", "The Beauty of Men: Ocean Vuong's "On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, "Ocean Vuong Explores the Coming-of-Age of Queerness", "Survival as a Creative Force: An Interview with Ocean Vuong", "A poetic American novel of queer first love and family brutality", "Ocean Vuong's 'On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous' is permanently stunning", "On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous Is a Daring Tale of Queer Love and Pain", "Ocean Vuong's 'On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous' animates the visceral beauty of youth", https://www.penfaulkner.org/2020/05/04/our-video-celebration-of-the-2020-pen-faulkner-award/, https://www.nationalbook.org/2019-national-book-awards-longlist-for-fiction/, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=On_Earth_We%27re_Briefly_Gorgeous&oldid=956869370, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, This page was last edited on 15 May 2020, at 19:22. From Trevor, Little Dog comes to excavate new meanings about masculinity, pleasure, love, and intimacy.

Little Dog and his friends love 50 Cent and green apple Jolly Ranchers. Little Dog is the narrator and protagonist of the story. More important than labels, though, is the novel's earnest and open-hearted belief in the necessity of stories and language for our survival. Each of these lines, and this is only a small selection, is a pebble in the reader’s shoe. “Deep Purple Feeling” could be an alternative title for certain swaths of this novel. Your IP: 157.230.240.43 On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous Characters . "Art needs to be honest. In … The strongest parts of “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous,” where this novel picks up genuine force and has some of the mournful resonance of the Bruce Springsteen song “The River,” arrive in its second half. It’s a vaccine, drawing strains of the world’s toxins and, in exposing us to them, helping us bare and survive them. "[16], The book was named one of the top ten books of 2019 by the Washington Post. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous will hurt you, but it will also make you feel seen. But that’s because I feel evangelical. All 40 characters in On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous are alphabetically listed along with character descriptions. Little Dog’s abusive father is absent. Sometimes, it’s the only pure honesty you’ll get all day." “They will want you to succeed, but never more than them.

‘On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous’ Captures a Young Immigrant’s Troubles and Ecstasies, Ocean Vuong, author of “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous.”. Ocean Vuong is a young Vietnamese-American writer — born in Saigon, he was raised in Hartford, Conn. — who made his debut in 2016 with “Night Sky With Exit Wounds,” a strong and much-praised book of poems. Gunshots in downtown Hartford sound “like Little League home runs cracked one after another out of the night’s park.” After a day of work in nearby tobacco fields, Little Dog’s hands are “so thick and black with sap, dirt, pebbles and splinters, they resembled the bottom of a pan of burned rice.”, Some lines have the almost hallucinatory exactness of his best poems: “The black wren this morning on my windowsill: a charred pear.” He can also dispatch Lenny Bruce-like wisecracks: “The one good thing about national anthems is that we’re already on our feet, and therefore ready to run.”. "In Briefly Gorgeous, pain is never far from love and the past is always twinned with the present.". The talented Bennett fuels her fiction with secrets—first in her lauded debut, The Mothers (2016), and now in the assured and magnetic story of the Vignes sisters, light-skinned women parked on opposite sides of the color line. I was just in the moment with Little Dog, feeling the spark of an almost-shared memory, that spooky, magical synergy you feel at the beginning of a friendship you know will last. On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous Character List. Their union is short-lived because Paul returns to the United States after his mother tells him that she has TBC. It’s a rare blessing to forget that a character is a character. I could be sitting across from him at a bar, hearing this story. But this is America in the early thousands, and opiates are sweeping the country. [14], Writing for the Los Angeles Times, Steph Cha called the novel "a book of sustained beauty and lyricism, earnest and relentless, a series of high notes that trembles exquisitely almost without break. Art needs to be honest. "[12], Ron Charles of The Washington Post praised the novel, calling it "permanently stunning". Lan is Little Dog’s grandmother. I can’t help thinking this should be our new national motto. His mother faked a TBC infection so he would have to come home and leave Lan behind. She dies of bone cancer in the presence of her family. Paul and Lan are now estranged.

The novel is written in the form of a letter by a young Vietnamese American nicknamed Little Dog, whose life mirrors that of Ocean Vuong.
About once every four years, a book sweeps me off my feet, makes me wild with excitement, gives me new ideas about how to approach my own writing.

Because my first bike was loose jointed and rust speckled, rescued from the trash, and for a tenth of a second, I honestly forgot that I was reading a novel. He and Little Dog enter a romantic relationship and explore their sexuality together. The narrator of “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous” is known to nearly everyone as Little Dog.

[1], The novel debuted at number six on The New York Times Hardcover Fiction best-sellers list on June 23, 2019.

He’s a writer in his late 20s, but this story is told largely in retrospect.
Through his writing, he attempts making sense of his past, reconstructing his memories and relationships, as a means to conveying some impossible truth to his mother. So much in Briefly Gorgeous possesses this feeling of rightness. The narrator of the novel is an unnamed 28-year-old man.

The child is Little Dog's mother, Rose. Cloudflare Ray ID: 5e909edd3927ddf9 That’s the thing about Vuong’s novel, the sticky quality that makes the story latch on and take hold in your mind: it feels real, intimate as a conversation between close friends.

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