Foot and Fire

On Earth, We're Briefly Gorgeous  by Ocean Vuong Paperback, 196 pages This is the first novel of the contemporary American Poet Ocean Vuong which tells of a story of writer Little Dog through letters addressed to her mother who is illiterate. This may be a novel but it's fifty percent autobiographical. Some nonfictional portions are the fact that Vuong's mother worked as a manicurist and he also became a writer and that they are Vietnamese immigrants and lived in Hartford, Connecticut. He's also a queer.    The story is told in an epistolary form but in a non-linear manner. It is about struggles of being a child of Vietnam war who immigrated to the US with his grandmother and mother, who grows up to be a queer, who had a relationship with an all-American boy who is an addict.       The story may be about the coming-of-age of a Vietnamese immigrant in the US seeking to fit and thrive and survive in the land of milk and honey but in the end, it i...

The unbearable lightness of being By Milan Kundera Paperback, 314 pages Fiction & Philosophy I had attempted to read this novel before and recalled that I got heady by the introductory chapter as it tackles Philosophy. I am glad that I read it through this time, and maybe it is because I was able to read it at the right period of my life. On the personal level, I think if one has suffered/ is suffering from a midlife crisis, one can really understand the philosophical elucidations of the narrator (that is Kundera the author). We live our lives only once and since it is so, we have no other lives/ decisions to compare it from. This is opposed to the Nietze's philosophy of eternal return where eveything we experience recur in infinity, and thus if life does not recur, it mean nothing.  Lightness then is the idea that life is devoid of inherent meaning or significance, and individuals are free to make choices without being burdened by moral or existential weight or heaviness. If o...