Rating: 2 out of 5.

Between poetry and prose, there’s a confusing hell called ‘On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous’. The book is filled with sentences that desperately want to be quotable, yet very few are actually memorable. The prose sometimes does seem briefly gorgeous, but is like a mirage. From a distance it appears profound, but the closer you get, the illusion begins to fade, revealing little more than page after page of overwrought, fragmented writing.

‘On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous’ is just a little longer than a novella, under 250 pages, and is supposed to be like a long letter to author Ocean Vuong’s mother, who ironically cannot read English. That’s precisely the point: he would like to say a lot of these things to her but doesn’t have the courage to. So he writes everything down in a language she cannot understand.

Which then makes one wonder: why is he writing about the things that happened to his maternal grandmother? Stories his mother surely already knows? Well, it’s obviously for the readers, because some of the most interesting events in this poetic memoir of sorts don’t even happen to the author. Much of the book is filled with imagery, anecdotes, and the haunting legacy of the Vietnam War, even though the author never experienced it directly. Ocean Vuong was born in 1988, while the Vietnam War ended in 1975.

The author does share slivers of his own life, ranging from his struggles with learning English as a child to falling for a white boy while working part-time on a tobacco farm without telling his mother. In these pages, one senses there is more than enough going on in the author’s own life for the book to focus primarily on him rather than borrowing so heavily from his mother’s and grandmother’s experiences.

Instead, he rotates between these threads rather arbitrarily, which some might view as an effective literary device since memories, after all, aren’t coherent. We jump from one image to another in our minds, and that jumble of experiences regurgitated with some pretty phrases across ‘On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous’. And it almost never feels like a letter. For a while, I even wondered whether Vuong’s mother had dementia, and whether that was why he kept recounting events from her own life. But that isn’t the case.

Ocean Vuong’s efforts to be poetic are at times impressive, but he overdoes the metaphors, some of which are weirdly comical. The narrative style constantly threw me off, and there were several times I simply wanted to quit and put On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous on the ‘DNF’ (did not finish) list. Especially now that Goodreads allows readers to mark books as ‘DNF’. Life is too short to struggle through uninteresting books, but I’m also too stubborn to give up on something as simple as an annoying novel. And yes, that’s only a personal opinion. If you read this book and love it, I’d be happy for you, perhaps even a little envious.

I needed On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous to be more structured, to have more story, to be more personal, and to be less warped (yes, warped, not wrapped) by clever, lyrical prose. The paragraphs often feel performative, as if the author is telling the reader, “Oh look, I can sound literary too. Isn’t this sentence so fancy? Aren’t I so smart?” Maybe. But could the author instead tell us what it really felt like when your mother wouldn’t acknowledge you? When your lover pretended you were just a phase?

By the end of this long, winding book, I felt more alienated than familiar with the author. Just because he shares some of his first sexual experiences doesn’t, by any means, make this memoir intimate. He floods the novel with so many threads that it almost feels as though he deliberately tries to seem sincere while never quite allowing us to see his true self. I guess this just wasn’t for me.

Rating for On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous: 2 stars on 5.

You can find me on Facebook, GoodReads, Instagram & Twitter/X 

Read Next: Should You Read ‘A Man’ by Keiichiro Hirano? (Audio Below)