Book Review #28 : On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

I started this book, thinking of some different perspectives it will offer me as an audience. But while reading and interpreting the gist of everything, I somehow lost my pace. I may have to re-read it again to fully grasp the essence but whatever I grasped after reading it once is faded and unexplored I guess.

Undoubtedly, this is a phenomenal take by the author Ocean Vuong on war, violence, migration, language barrier, and unreal love experiences. This book covers the part of an innocence with the haunting shadows. On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous offers a subtle understanding of the bond between a son and a mother. It offers an unknown saying of language dependencies over visual telepathy. It offers the tragedies of immigrants. It offers a slight tint of love under rainbowy vows. It offers the ghostly dreams of many unheard stories. It offers an irrelevant letter from a son to his mother in the strangest of ways. 

I loved the delicacies of the parts, where Ocean has garnished with tiniest details of feeling, with unimaginable metaphors of life. Few of them that I adored the most are : 

• “Some people say history moves in a spiral, not the line we have come to expect. We travel through time in a circular trajectory, our distance increasing from an epicenter only to return again, one circle removed.”

• “There were colors, Ma. Yes, there were colors I felt when I was with him. Not words - but shades, penumbras.”

• “It is no accident, Ma, that the comma resembles a fetus - that curve of continuation. We were all inside our mothers, saying, with our entire curved and silent selves, more, ore, more”

• “Is that what art is? To be touched thinking what we feel is ours when, in the end, it was someone else, in longing, who finds us?”

• “...Then his eyelashes. You could hear them think.”

You can find your shattered soul while reading the expressions shared between Little Dog and his mother. I suggest trying to understand what this book has for you. Because for me, it was a mixed emotions of existence and relevance of existence. The kind of local flavor roasted on the fire of migration is somewhere focused to lighten up the audience. But the reality is to extend the pain that was supposed to be dug out by surroundings. 

Overall, Ocean has carved an incredible gem out of pain and sufferings, which is hard to be believed as a fictional work. If you want to try something exceptional, do read this book.