Ocean Vuong: On earth we are briefly gorgeous, 9781787331501, Vintage / Penguin Random House, hardback

German Edition: Auf Erden sind wir kurz grandios, Carl Hanser Verlag, hardback

Ocean Vuong’s „On earth we are briefly gorgeous“ is one of these memorable books that will stay in your head for quite a while.  I still remember some sentences after 6 weeks!   One of the best literary reads for me for quite some time. 

Written by a poet in the most beautiful, elegant prose, this debut novel is many things: a heart-wrenching love story of Little Dog, a boy growing up as an outsider in America with a Vietnamese heritage but also discovering his homosexuality at age 15 to Trevor, the son of a tobacco farmer, a love letter written to his mother Rose who cannot read or write and earns their living slaving away in nail salons, the sometimes funny yet sad portrait of their lives as a family together with his very Vietnamese schizophrenic grandmother Lan, the absence of his biological and substitute father, both white Americans, the flashbacks to his grandmother’s and his mother’s lives during the Vietnam war, this novel is a whole mélange of feelings and memories. Vuong is unusually frank with the description of homosexual sex scenes; the tenderness of Little Dogs and Trevor’s feelings for one another and the heart-wrenching unfolding drama brought a lump to my throat.

Reading this unusual novel has been an absolute delight.