A son writes a long letter to his mother, but she will not be able to read it even though she is alive - because she is illiterate.
In Vietnamese-American Ocean Vuong's romance debut For a while, we are beautiful on earth (translated by Andreas Lundberg) Little Dog grows up in the shadow of the Vietnam War as the mother and grandmother fled, in a US where racism intensifies acute class divisions. It is a novel about trauma that is inherited for generations and the awfulness that just happened.
The letter is literature that everyone may have written at some point, and the particular letter receives a special charge of being public. "Dear Mom" - Can we really read on when we are not being addressed?
When reading Ocean Vuong's novel it is easy to think of, for example, Édouard Louis compressed Who Killed My Father from the Other Year. It, too, was aimed at a violent parent who was fighting to defend himself against poverty and vulnerability, and was signed by a son who became a class traveler in stranglehold for the feeling of not deserving of his life.
The baby Little Dog knows everything about how love settles in the body, both as longing and absence. Grandma Lans curved back. Mom's chemically damaged hands. His own dog name as a spell against evil powers, to no further help when a boy has a pink bicycle on the streets of masculinity.
Young man Little Dog's first love Trevor is devastating because he is addicted to drugs. He will be one of all the deaths - starting with legal and lucrative prescription painkillers - that the New York Times investigated already in 2016, and found that it has killed more Americans in drug overdoses like fentanyl and heroin than died during the nearly 20 the Vietnam War. Such deadly encounters require no symbolism.
So love equals breaking. Just as his words to his mother only increase the distance between them.
Vuong - who was praised for his debut with the poem collection Night Sky with Bullet Hole 2016 - carries the realism with the language: from the son's interpretations of the mother's words to his own path into the privileges of the formation. The scenes burst into the reader like language storms. As a child, trying to teach mom to read and her violent anger when she fails "with a crisis in her face". The common struggle to resemble a normal son, a normal mother. "I'm not a monster. I'm a mother. "
You want to cut out sentences and attach them to the inside of the eyelids to hide and preserve them. Especially his depictions of work: smashed tobacco workers, the acetone-smelling women of the nail salon. The handle, the body language. People who collapse and are replaced with new ones. Only she, the mother, can never be replaced. He becomes a writer born of a war that is exchanged for another that is going on while he writes about freedom.
Although the truth is that "the impossibility of reading this is the only thing that makes my writing possible."