Fourth summer read, 2019: Vuong

I discovered Ocean Vuong when he won the TS Eliot prize in 2017 for his first collection of poetry, Night Sky with Exit Wounds. I used this collection in class and picked out a poem which we annotated and analysed whilst studying modern poetry. When his new novel came out, I was surprised. I naively thought that poets are poets. However, the prose writer in Vuong is naturally poetic. The blurring of forms is beginning to form.

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

I recently wrote in my journal that writing is all about revealing secrets and the reader is the person to uncover them - whatever their perception is. Here, in Vuong's novel, we are thrown into the mind of a man through a confessional letter that may not even reach its sender; but it reaches us. It has to reach us; it has to reach someone. One man’s story is another woman’s discovery and vice versa.

Favourite Quotes: 

‘Only the future revisits the past’

‘Sometimes I don’t know what or who we are. Days I feel like a human being, while other days I feel more like a sound.’

This is an epistolary novel written to his mother: life interleaved and woven through unnamed chapters: a life trying to be understood. It is startlingly honest and poetic; snapshots of memories using imagery of butterflies to represent immigration and the struggle of how war permeates within a character.

This book is written very carefully; the chosen memories are like small rays of light coming through a cracked door into another world. We see this world, partially, and crave to indulge in its beauty.

Family struggles; eating monkey brain; tiger woods; sex; death; love; war; butterflies; beauty.

The poetic beauty of the words juxtaposes with the subject of the thought, making the ideas seem more tragic - more hopelessly, briefly gorgeous:

“All this time I told myself we were born from war - but I was wrong, Ma. We were born from beauty.”

Vuong is trying to tell us that violence, corruption, war and all things full of hatred can detract us from spotting the true beauty of the world. We just need to be aware of what we’re missing - and sometimes, we need someone to tell us what and where that beauty is: nature and humans - those little moments that briefly flicker across our lives like butterflies and love.

But it’s more than that. It’s about deeper existence and reincarnation. It’s about survival in a world where to feel his and experience the love he craves; it’s a sin. It’s about the excesses of life - trying to be balanced by living in the shadows of beauty and failing to be good in your own eyes. It’s about self acceptance and being able to live in a world that’s dealt you an unfair hand. 

Moreover, I spot that it’s about hoping for “a room full of books with parents who will read you bedtime stories in a country not touched by war.”. This, I hope, I can do for my new child. It’s about how crazy the world can seem when we all seem to crave is someone else’s existence within an idea of permanent happiness that doesn’t exist and that “too much joy is lost in our desperation to keep it”.