On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
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- اطلاعات
- نقد و بررسی
- دیدگاه کاربران
نقد و بررسی
April 1, 2019
Poet Vuong’s frank first novel (after Night Sky with Exit Wounds) takes the form of a letter from a man to his illiterate mother in which 28-year-old Little Dog, a writer who’s left the impoverished Hartford, Conn., of his youth for New York City, retraces his coming of age. His childhood is marked by abuse from his overworked mother, as well as the traumas he’s inherited from his mother’s and grandmother’s experiences during the Vietnam War. Having left Vietnam with them as a young boy, and after the incarceration of his father, Little Dog’s attempts to assimilate include contending with language barriers and the banal cruelty of the supposedly well-intentioned. He must also adapt to the world as a gay man and as a writer—the novel’s beating heart rests in Little Dog’s first, doomed love affair with another teenage boy, and in his attempts to describe what being a writer truly is. Vuong’s prose shines in the intimate scenes between the young men, but sometimes the lyricism has a straining, vague quality (“They say nothing lasts forever but they’re just scared it will last longer than they will love it”; “But the thing about forever is you can’t take it back”). Nevertheless, this is a haunting meditation on loss, love, and the limits of human connection.
Ocean Vuong narrates the story of a young Vietnamese immigrant to the U.S. who is completing a letter to his mother, who cannot read. As both author and narrator, Vuong is in the perfect position to narrate the audiobook just as it was intended. His delivery gives even more power to the captivating prose, keeping the listener hooked as the main character, Little Dog, discovers what it means to be young, gay, and Vietnamese in a country that is not able to truly understand him. The listener is carried along with Vuong's voice, almost as if listening to a carefully crafted melody. V.B. � AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine
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