On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous: A Novel

A beautiful story that infringes upon multiple themes of violence, history, multi-generational trauma, immigrant experience, sexuality, and resilience. Would recommend if you are looking for a heavy read and have a couple of hours to spare as well as some cleanax wipes

This was a great and quick read. In total it took me 5 hours to complete this book.This story is a story of an immigrant living and retelling the stories of the immigrants before him such as his mom and grandma.Beautifully written. Loved the portrayal of color. In the beginning of the book, the narrator describes colors to inanimate objects/feelings. As he grows older, other people begin to see him as his own skin color, hence they began to project their understanding of color on to him. Suddenly, color no longer describes an object/feeling but it becomes a weapon that divides people. Color becomes a tool that allows him to be put into a box before ever having the opportunity to give others a chance to know him. Color becomes his identity, as well as the identity of everyone around him. It’s also interesting how trauma affects not only those who lived through traumatic experiences, but also their children who will end up growing up with that trauma.The book has many themes including:• Race• Growing up as an American• Growing up with different cultural identities• Self Identity/Self Discovery• Generational Trauma• Inherited Trauma•Post war affects• Growing up bi racial• Complex parental relationships• Immigrants•Immigrants (due to war)•LGBTThings I disliked:Children having sex:Although the narrator is telling his story, and he is going back in time. I felt highly uncomfortable with the explicit scenes of minors having sex. There was no need to describe certain parts of the body as he did. Simply because of the fact that they were minors when this physical relationship happened. He could have easily mentioned how he felt instead of drawing explicit pictures for his audience.Neutral comment:Parts the story seemed messy, however I personally liked it and I understood it because that’s how my brain works. Making footnotes of footnotes. At the same time, it made sense for the story to be “messy” as he’s writing a letter to his mother. It’s not going to be neat. When you write a letter to your loved ones, many times you’re reminiscing about the old times, and so one memory will turn into another into another into another, and so it gives off the authentic vibes of a letter to someone close to you. You want them to remember the scene that you were at.As many have mentioned, this book isn’t for everyone.Overall, I rate this book 8.0279/10It’s a great book, easy to read, and it brought me out of my reading hiatus!

In April 2022, the book discussion group at the LGBT Center in NYC was in almost universal agreement about this poetic memoir-novel, with only some minor disagreement about whether this is a four-and-a-half-star or full-five-star work.Everyone was wild about the brilliant and colorfully impressionistic writing - completely over the top. Bob compared the writing to the complexity of a millefleur paperweight. While I'm a sucker for this sort of literary folderol, a few of us thought that it might be too poetic at times, and that a bit ugly language might be better to describe the Vietnamese war or some of Little Dog's abuse.We talked about the animal metaphors: the taxidermied deer in the rest area, the trapped monkey, the caged veal calves, the Monarch butterflies that fly in one direction (only the children return), the buffalo who fall off the cliff (search for David Wojanrowicz's buffalo image) and, of course, Little Dog, himself."On Earth..." presents the truly poor, the working impoverished. It also shows Vietnam and the war from the point of the invaded Vietnamese, and shows Little Dog as a true outsider: "Keep your head down. Stay invisible. You're already Vietnamese." Racism is common. Little Dog's boyfriend Trevor is also from an impoverished and alcohol-addled broken home (literally, a falling apart trailer). The intergenerational trauma extends across all the families in the novel. Heterosexuality gets a bad rap, too; there are no intact straight families to be found.This is not a coming out story. Little Dog and Trevor find each other and explore their sexuality. When Little Dog tells his mother that he's gay, she accepts it as she accepts so many other things she doesn't understand.All the humor is midnight dark: the women at the nail salon, one with the dead horse and the other with one leg; the taxidermied deer in the rest area; and Lan's dentures after she dies.Facts are dropped into the novel, both about the Oxy epidemic of overdoses and the multi-racial outsider hero Tiger Woods. It reminds us that these stories are real.The novel is built on the themes of escape, memory, and language. It is full of floating fragments, perhaps too many fragments at times, too jumpy, too overlapping and spiral without enough story, and overly metaphoric at times, but beautiful and authentic, all at the same time.