A Little Life: A Novel, by Hanya Yanagihara
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A Little Life: A Novel, by Hanya Yanagihara
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NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALISTSHORT-LISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZEBrace yourself for the most astonishing, challenging, upsetting, and profoundly moving book in many a season. An epic about love and friendship in the twenty-first century that goes into some of the darkest places fiction has ever traveled and yet somehow improbably breaks through into the light. Truly an amazement—and a great gift for its readers. When four classmates from a small Massachusetts college move to New York to make their way, they're broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition. There is kind, handsome Willem, an aspiring actor; JB, a quick-witted, sometimes cruel Brooklyn-born painter seeking entry to the art world; Malcolm, a frustrated architect at a prominent firm; and withdrawn, brilliant, enigmatic Jude, who serves as their center of gravity. Over the decades, their relationships deepen and darken, tinged by addiction, success, and pride. Yet their greatest challenge, each comes to realize, is Jude himself, by midlife a terrifyingly talented litigator yet an increasingly broken man, his mind and body scarred by an unspeakable childhood, and haunted by what he fears is a degree of trauma that he’ll not only be unable to overcome—but that will define his life forever. In rich and resplendent prose, Yanagihara has fashioned a tragic and transcendent hymn to brotherly love, a masterful depiction of heartbreak, and a dark examination of the tyranny of memory and the limits of human endurance.From the Hardcover edition.
A Little Life: A Novel, by Hanya Yanagihara- Amazon Sales Rank: #1064 in eBooks
- Published on: 2015-03-10
- Released on: 2015-03-10
- Format: Kindle eBook
Review Utterly gripping. Wonderfully romantic and sometimes harrowing, A Little Life kept me reading late into the night, night after night -- Edmund White One of the pleasures of fiction is how suddenly a brilliant writer can alter the literary landscape ... Ms. Yanagihara's immense new book ... announces her, as decisively as a second work can, as a major American novelist. Here is an epic study of trauma and friendship written with such intelligence and depth of perception that it will be one of the benchmarks against which all other novels that broach those subjects (and they are legion) will be measured. In recent years, only Edward St. Aubyn's Patrick Melrose novels have confronted with similarly enduring power the long aftermath of abuse (and the sleepless duties required in loving abuse victims). But while Mr. St. Aubyn's writing relies on matador-like thrusts of barbed irony, A Little Life achieves its lasting effect with calm, thoroughgoing realism. There's an amazing sense of totality in the portrayals here, and in Jude especially. He is fragmented by fear and shame, but Ms. Yanagihara depicts him as a man in full. His life, the precarious essence of this important novel, is not less than an odyssey of survival Wall Street Journal Martin Amis once asked, "Who else but Tolstoy has made happiness really swing on the page?" And the surprising answer is that Hanya Yanagihara has: counterintuitively, the most moving parts of "A Little Life" are not its most brutal but its tenderest ones, moments when Jude receives kindness and support from his friends ... "A Little Life" feels elemental, irreducible-and, dark and disturbing though it is, there is beauty in it -- Jon Michaud New Yorker How often is a novel so deeply disturbing that you might find yourself weeping, and yet so revelatory about human kindness that you might also feel touched by grace? Yanagihara's astonishing and unsettling second novel ... plumbs the rich inner lives of all of her characters... You don't just care deeply about all these lives. Thanks to the author's exquisite skill, you feel as if you are living them ... A Little Life is about the unimaginable cruelty of human beings, the savage things done to a child and his lifelong struggle to overcome the damage. Its pages are soaked with grief, but it's also about the bottomless human capacity for love and endurance ... It's not hyperbole to call this novel a masterwork - if anything that word is simply just too little for it San Francisco Chronicle [The] spring's must-read novel ... Her debut ... put her on the literary map, her massive new novel ... signals the arrival of a major new voice in fiction ... Her achievement has less to do with size than with her powerful evocation of the fragility of self ... the pained beauty that suffuses this novel, an American epic that eloquently counters our culture's fixation with redemptive narratives. Vogue US The triumph of A Little Life's many pages is significant: It wraps us so thoroughly in a character's life that his trauma, his struggles, his griefs come to seem as familiar and inescapable as our own. There's no one way to experience loss, abuse, or the effects of trauma, of course, but the vividness of Jude's character and experiences makes the pain almost tangible, the fall-out more comprehensible. It's a monument of empathy, and that alone makes this novel wondrous Huffington Post Often painful but thoroughly brilliant ... Yanagihara's massive new novel ... is hurtful. That's because, among other things, it is the enthralling and completely immersive story of one man's unyielding pain. It also asks a compelling question: Can friends save us? Even from ourselves? ... Yanagihara's close study of [her characters'] lives and Jude's trauma makes for a stunning work of fiction New York Daily News This spellbinding, feverish novel sucks you in ... One of the most compassionate, moving stories of our time ... An exquisitely written, complex triumph Oprah.com A darkly beautiful tale of love and friendship... I've read a lot of emotionally taxing books in my time, but A Little Life ... is the only one I've read as an adult that's left me sobbing. I became so invested in the characters and their lives that I almost felt unqualified to review this book objectively ... There are truths here that are almost too much to bear - that hope is a qualified thing, that even love, no matter how pure and freely given, is not always enough. This book made me realize how merciful most fiction really is, even at its darkest, and it's a testament to Yanagihara's ability that she can take such ugly material and make it beautiful Los Angeles Times Capacious and consuming ... Boast[s] a scale and immersive power to rival the recent epics of Donna Tartt and Elizabeth Gilbert ... Alternately devastating and draining, A Little Life floats all sorts of troubling questions about the responsibility of the individual to those nearest and dearest and the sometime futility of playing brother's keeper. Those questions, accompanied by Yanagihara's exquisitely imagined characters, will shadow your dreamscapes Boston Globe An extraordinary book ... A Little Life is quite deliberately a fable, not social realism ... and all the more powerful for it. The truths it tells are wrenching, permanent. -- David Sexton Evening Standard A Little Life makes for near-hypnotically compelling reading, a vivid, hyperreal portrait of human existence that demands intense emotional investment ... An astonishing achievement: a novel of grand drama and sentiment, but it's a canvas Yanagihara has painted with delicate, subtle brushstrokes. Independent Hanya Yanagihara's no-holds-barred second novel A Little Life has established her as a major new voice in US fiction. -- Tim Adams Observer A singularly profound and moving work ... It's not often that you read a book of this length and find yourself thinking "I wish it was longer" but Yanagihara takes you so deeply into the lives and minds of these characters that you struggle to leave them behind. -- Fiona Wilson The Times This is an impressive and moving novel. -- Hannah Rosefield Literary Review A Little Life is Jude's story and it's his sorrow that colours this devastating, exhausting, strangely exhilarating novel. It's not in any way consoling but it is vitally compelling. -- Eithne Farry Daily Express How many times a year are you blown away by a book? That feeling that you can't stop reading, that your life might be a little bit changed? ... I felt in the presence of genius, and 14 sleepless hours later I inhaled the last few sentences knowing I had found a masterpiece ... Objectively, parts of this are a gruelling read, but such is the author's skill that the pages do seem to turn themselves as we race towards finding out the terrible secrets of Jude's dark trauma... I will be heading to the barricades if this doesn't win prizes galore -- Cathy Rentzenbrink The Bookseller Has so much richness in it - great big passages of beautiful prose, unforgettable characters, and shrewd insights into art and ambition and friendship and forgiveness Entertainment Weekly Astonishing ... tender, torturous and achingly alive to the undeniable pain that can scar a life. Psychologies The clarity of Yanagihara's prose is perfect for dissecting blind ambition, the consolations of work and money, and how these paper over the cracks of fragile, fractured individuals ... A Little Life is unlike anything else out there ... Quite simply unforgettable. -- James Kidd Independent on Sunday This new book is long, page-turny, deeply moving, sometimes excessive, but always packed with the weight of a genuine experience. As I was reading, I literally dreamed about it every night ... The book's driven obsessiveness is inseparable from the emotional force that will leave countless readers weeping ... A wrenching portrait of the enduring grace of friendship. With her sensitivity to everything from the emotional nuance to the play of light inside a subway car, Yanagihara is superb at capturing the radiant moments of beauty, warmth and kindness that help redeem the bad stuff. In A Little Life, it's life's evanescent blessings that maybe, but only maybe, can save you National Public Radio Once she has you, Yanagihara is not going to let you go ... Yanagihara ... contains multitudes. She seems able to imagine anything ... A Little Life ... is, in its own dark way, a miracle Newsday At its heart A Little Life is a fairy tale that pits good against evil, love against viciousness, hope against hopelessness. The cruelty of the life Ms Yanagihara describes is trumped only by the tenacity with which she searches for an answer. The Economist The reader is pulled along by its express-train pace ... it's certainly a great book. -- John Harding Daily Mail The first must-read novel of the year ... The way to describe a novel you like, maybe the quickest way, is to say that you can't put it down. People say that all the time. There are also novels that compel trickier, but no less passionate, emotions. They are books that confront you and make you wrestle with them. You might feel protective of the characters and their fates; maybe you feel like the writer is talking directly to, or about, you and you are delighted but spooked about what the writer might reveal. There is no shorthand phrase for a novel that seduces you even as it frightens, guts, exhausts, and disgusts you. A Little Life is the most devastating but satisfying novel published so far this year ... Finishing its 720 pages is like finishing one of the doorstop novels of 19th-century Russia: you feel worn out but wide awake -- (Cover Story) Kirkus Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life is the thinking person's big book of the year so far, a long, complex and pretty dark look at the intertwined lives of four college friends. It reminds me of The Corrections, or a starker The Interestings, or a more linear work by David Foster Wallace. Really. It's that huge and important Amazon.com Set to become one of the year's most talked-about novels ... The narrative is transporting. -- Alex Clarke ES Magazine Utterly compelling ... quite an extraordinary novel. It is impossible to put down ... And it is almost impossible to forget. -- Mernie Gilmore Daily Express A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara, will be one of those books people ask you if you've read yet. Beat 'em to the punch South Coast Today Utterly enthralling ... The phrase "tour de force" could have been invented for this audacious novel Kirkus (Starred Review) Emerging from horror, persistent and enduring, is a touching, eternal, unconventional love story. -- Maria Crawford Financial Times [A] wholly immersive unforgettable read ... You won't stop reading. And it's a novel that changes you. Evening Standard A Little Life asks serious questions about humanism and euthanasia and psychiatry and any number of the partis pris of modern western life. It's Entourage directed by Bergman; it's the great 90s novel a quarter of a century too late; it's a devastating read that will leave your heart, like the Grinch's, a few sizes larger. -- Alex Preston Observer Transporting ... A Little Life is not to be missed. -- Alex Clark Evening Standard Deeply moving ... A Little Life interrogates notions of value and happiness as espoused by the 21st century American dream ... Extraordinarily rich. The National A book that demands to be read. -- James Daunt Wall Street Journal Beautifully rendered ... Unlike anything I've read before. -- Alex Preston, 'A vintage year for the novel' Observer A remarkable tale of love, friendship and the difficulties of embracing life when everything conspires against your right to happiness. Sunday Herald
About the Author Hanya Yanagihara is the author of The People in the Trees. She lives in New York City.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. 1The eleventh apartment had only one closet, but it did have a sliding glass door that opened onto a small balcony, from which he could see a man sitting across the way, outdoors in only a T-shirt and shorts even though it was October, smoking. Willem held up a hand in greeting to him, but the man didn’t wave back.In the bedroom, Jude was accordioning the closet door, opening and shutting it, when Willem came in. “There’s only one closet,” he said.“That’s okay,” Willem said. “I have nothing to put in it anyway.”“Neither do I.” They smiled at each other. The agent from the building wandered in after them. “We’ll take it,” Jude told her.But back at the agent’s office, they were told they couldn’t rent the apartment after all. “Why not?” Jude asked her.“You don’t make enough to cover six months’ rent, and you don’t have anything in savings,” said the agent, suddenly terse. She had checked their credit and their bank accounts and had at last realized that there was something amiss about two men in their twenties who were not a couple and yet were trying to rent a one-bedroom apartment on a dull (but still expensive) stretch of Twenty-fifth Street. “Do you have anyone who can sign on as your guarantor? A boss? Parents?”“Our parents are dead,” said Willem, swiftly.The agent sighed. “Then I suggest you lower your expectations. No one who manages a well-run building is going to rent to candidates with your financial profile.” And then she stood, with an air of finality, and looked pointedly at the door.When they told JB and Malcolm this, however, they made it into a comedy: the apartment floor became tattooed with mouse droppings, the man across the way had almost exposed himself, the agent was upset because she had been flirting with Willem and he hadn’t reciprocated.“Who wants to live on Twenty-fifth and Second anyway,” asked JB. They were at Pho Viet Huong in Chinatown, where they met twice a month for dinner. Pho Viet Huong wasn’t very good--the pho was curiously sugary, the lime juice was soapy, and at least one of them got sick after every meal--but they kept coming, both out of habit and necessity. You could get a bowl of soup or a sandwich at Pho Viet Huong for five dollars, or you could get an entrée, which were eight to ten dollars but much larger, so you could save half of it for the next day or for a snack later that night. Only Malcolm never ate the whole of his entrée and never saved the other half either, and when he was finished eating, he put his plate in the center of the table so Willem and JB--who were always hungry--could eat the rest.“Of course we don’t want to live at Twenty-fifth and Second, JB,” said Willem, patiently, “but we don’t really have a choice. We don’t have any money, remember?”“I don’t understand why you don’t stay where you are,” said Malcolm, who was now pushing his mushrooms and tofu--he always ordered the same dish: oyster mushrooms and braised tofu in a treacly brown sauce--around his plate, as Willem and JB eyed it.“Well, I can’t,” Willem said. “Remember?” He had to have explained this to Malcolm a dozen times in the last three months. “Merritt’s boyfriend’s moving in, so I have to move out.”“But why do you have to move out?”“Because it’s Merritt’s name on the lease, Malcolm!” said JB.“Oh,” Malcolm said. He was quiet. He often forgot what he considered inconsequential details, but he also never seemed to mind when people grew impatient with him for forgetting. “Right.” He moved the mushrooms to the center of the table. “But you, Jude--”“I can’t stay at your place forever, Malcolm. Your parents are going to kill me at some point.”“My parents love you.”“That’s nice of you to say. But they won’t if I don’t move out, and soon.”Malcolm was the only one of the four of them who lived at home, and as JB liked to say, if he had Malcolm’s home, he would live at home too. It wasn’t as if Malcolm’s house was particularly grand--it was, in fact, creaky and ill-kept, and Willem had once gotten a splinter simply by running his hand up its banister--but it was large: a real Upper East Side town house. Malcolm’s sister, Flora, who was three years older than him, had moved out of the basement apartment recently, and Jude had taken her place as a short-term solution: Eventually, Malcolm’s parents would want to reclaim the unit to convert it into offices for his mother’s literary agency, which meant Jude (who was finding the flight of stairs that led down to it too difficult to navigate anyway) had to look for his own apartment.And it was natural that he would live with Willem; they had been roommates throughout college. In their first year, the four of them had shared a space that consisted of a cinder-blocked common room, where sat their desks and chairs and a couch that JB’s aunts had driven up in a U-Haul, and a second, far tinier room, in which two sets of bunk beds had been placed. This room had been so narrow that Malcolm and Jude, lying in the bottom bunks, could reach out and grab each other’s hands. Malcolm and JB had shared one of the units; Jude and Willem had shared the other.“It’s blacks versus whites,” JB would say.“Jude’s not white,” Willem would respond.“And I’m not black,” Malcolm would add, more to annoy JB than because he believed it.“Well,” JB said now, pulling the plate of mushrooms toward him with the tines of his fork, “I’d say you could both stay with me, but I think you’d fucking hate it.” JB lived in a massive, filthy loft in Little Italy, full of strange hallways that led to unused, oddly shaped cul-de-sacs and unfinished half rooms, the Sheetrock abandoned mid-construction, which belonged to another person they knew from college. Ezra was an artist, a bad one, but he didn’t need to be good because, as JB liked to remind them, he would never have to work in his entire life. And not only would he never have to work, but his children’s children’s children would never have to work: They could make bad, unsalable, worthless art for generations and they would still be able to buy at whim the best oils they wanted, and impractically large lofts in downtown Manhattan that they could trash with their bad architectural decisions, and when they got sick of the artist’s life--as JB was convinced Ezra someday would--all they would need to do is call their trust officers and be awarded an enormous lump sum of cash of an amount that the four of them (well, maybe not Malcolm) could never dream of seeing in their lifetimes. In the meantime, though, Ezra was a useful person to know, not only because he let JB and a few of his other friends from school stay in his apartment--at any time, there were four or five people burrowing in various corners of the loft--but because he was a good-natured and basically generous person, and liked to throw excessive parties in which copious amounts of food and drugs and alcohol were available for free.“Hold up,” JB said, putting his chopsticks down. “I just realized--there’s someone at the magazine renting some place for her aunt. Like, just on the verge of Chinatown.”“How much is it?” asked Willem.“Probably nothing--she didn’t even know what to ask for it. And she wants someone in there that she knows.”“Do you think you could put in a good word?”“Better--I’ll introduce you. Can you come by the office tomorrow?”Jude sighed. “I won’t be able to get away.” He looked at Willem.“Don’t worry--I can. What time?”“Lunchtime, I guess. One?”“I’ll be there.”Willem was still hungry, but he let JB eat the rest of the mushrooms. Then they all waited around for a bit; sometimes Malcolm ordered jackfruit ice cream, the one consistently good thing on the menu, ate two bites, and then stopped, and he and JB would finish the rest. But this time he didn’t order the ice cream, and so they asked for the bill so they could study it and divide it to the dollar.The next day, Willem met JB at his office. JB worked as a receptionist at a small but influential magazine based in SoHo that covered the downtown art scene. This was a strategic job for him; his plan, as he’d explained to Willem one night, was that he’d try to befriend one of the editors there and then convince him to feature him in the magazine. He estimated this taking about six months, which meant he had three more to go.JB wore a perpetual expression of mild disbelief while at his job, both that he should be working at all and that no one had yet thought to recognize his special genius. He was not a good receptionist. Although the phones rang more or less constantly, he rarely picked them up; when any of them wanted to get through to him (the cell phone reception in the building was inconsistent), they had to follow a special code of ringing twice, hanging up, and then ringing again. And even then he sometimes failed to answer--his hands were busy beneath his desk, combing and plaiting snarls of hair from a black plastic trash bag he kept at his feet.JB was going through, as he put it, his hair phase. Recently he had decided to take a break from painting in favor of making sculptures from black hair. Each of them had spent an exhausting weekend following JB from barbershop to beauty shop in Queens, Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Manhattan, waiting outside as JB went in to ask the owners for any sweepings or cuttings they might have, and then lugging an increasingly awkward bag of hair down the street after him. His early pieces had included The Mace, a tennis ball that he had de-fuzzed, sliced in half, and filled with sand before coating it in glue and rolling it around and around in a carpet of hair so that the bristles moved like seaweed underwater, and “The Kwotidien,” in which he covered various household items--a stapler; a spatula; a teacup--in pelts of hair. Now he was working on a large-scale project that he refused to discuss with them except in snatches, but it involved the combing out and braiding together of many pieces in order to make one apparently endless rope of frizzing black hair. The previous Friday he had lured them over with the promise of pizza and beer to help him braid, but after many hours of tedious work, it became clear that there was no pizza and beer forthcoming, and they had left, a little irritated but not terribly surprised.They were all bored with the hair project, although Jude--alone among them--thought that the pieces were lovely and would someday be considered significant. In thanks, JB had given Jude a hair-covered hairbrush, but then had reclaimed the gift when it looked like Ezra’s father’s friend might be interested in buying it (he didn’t, but JB never returned the hairbrush to Jude). The hair project had proved difficult in other ways as well; another evening, when the three of them had somehow been once again conned into going to Little Italy and combing out more hair, Malcolm had commented that the hair stank. Which it did: not of anything distasteful but simply the tangy metallic scent of unwashed scalp. But JB had thrown one of his mounting tantrums, and had called Malcolm a self-hating Negro and an Uncle Tom and a traitor to the race, and Malcolm, who very rarely angered but who angered over accusations like this, had dumped his wine into the nearest bag of hair and gotten up and stamped out. Jude had hurried, the best he could, after Malcolm, and Willem had stayed to handle JB. And although the two of them reconciled the next day, in the end Willem and Jude felt (unfairly, they knew) slightly angrier at Malcolm, since the next weekend they were back in Queens, walking from barbershop to barbershop, trying to replace the bag of hair that he had ruined.“How’s life on the black planet?” Willem asked JB now.“Black,” said JB, stuffing the plait he was untangling back into the bag. “Let’s go; I told Annika we’d be there at one thirty.” The phone on his desk began to ring.“Don’t you want to get that?”“They’ll call back.”As they walked downtown, JB complained. So far, he had concentrated most of his seductive energies on a senior editor named Dean, whom they all called DeeAnn. They had been at a party, the three of them, held at one of the junior editor’s parents’ apartment in the Dakota, in which art-hung room bled into art-hung room. As JB talked with his coworkers in the kitchen, Malcolm and Willem had walked through the apartment together (Where had Jude been that night? Working, probably), looking at a series of Edward Burtynskys hanging in the guest bedroom, a suite of water towers by the Bechers mounted in four rows of five over the desk in the den, an enormous Gursky floating above the half bookcases in the library, and, in the master bedroom, an entire wall of Diane Arbuses, covering the space so thoroughly that only a few centimeters of blank wall remained at the top and bottom. They had been admiring a picture of two sweet-faced girls with Down syndrome playing for the camera in their too-tight, too-childish bathing suits, when Dean had approached them. He was a tall man, but he had a small, gophery, pockmarked face that made him appear feral and untrustworthy.They introduced themselves, explained that they were here because they were JB’s friends. Dean told them that he was one of the senior editors at the magazine, and that he handled all the arts coverage.“Ah,” Willem said, careful not to look at Malcolm, whom he did not trust not to react. JB had told them that he had targeted the arts editor as his potential mark; this must be him.“Have you ever seen anything like this?” Dean asked them, waving a hand at the Arbuses.“Never,” Willem said. “I love Diane Arbus.”Dean stiffened, and his little features seemed to gather themselves into a knot in the center of his little face. “It’s DeeAnn.”“What?”“DeeAnn. You pronounce her name ‘DeeAnn.’ ”They had barely been able to get out of the room without laughing. “DeeAnn!” JB had said later, when they told him the story. “Christ! What a pretentious little shit.”
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458 of 503 people found the following review helpful. Empathetic, but Ultimately Devolves Into Tragedy Porn By Jon Huff My thoughts about this book are complicated. On one hand, it's beautifully written in many ways. On the other hand, it's a bit overblown in its writing, too. There are lovingly rendered details that create a lovely mental picture... and then the passage goes on... and on... until sometimes it devolves into lists. Lists that sometimes feel endless in their length and actually don't end up contributing much of anything to the story.I really did come to care for the characters in the book, which I think makes the book all the more cruel. I was prepared for a harrowing story. The book blurb broadcasts that loudly enough. I thought the portrayal of abuse and its consequences and the reverberations of it throughout a life were well done in many ways. The interplay between the characters and how their lives intertwine feels so real. But there is a point in the book where it all just starts to feel like tragedy porn. Tragedy porn that feels a great empathy for all those involved and is filled with well-defined characters... but tragedy porn none the less. In the end, it just feels sort of crassly manipulative... or, at least, misguided.I went from being a bit confused by the book juggling the four main characters (something that, structurally just ends up being kind of weird since two characters are basically dropped for most of the story... though I guess I understand their detailed set-up to an extent) to getting really involved in the characters we WERE following and being absorbed into the book and then, finally... almost hating the book by the end. The sorrow inflicted on the main character (and then to the characters around him) becomes, frankly, almost laughable. But not mirthful laughter. It's the sort of laughter you utter because you're not quite sure how else to react to what's being presented to you. There is a point where the movie in my mind of this book went from an artful indie film to a cheap LIfetime movie. I am sure there are people who have been through this much tragedy and pain or more, but that's not the point. In the context of this book, it just feels like the author was worried we wouldn't understand the main character's pain unless it was magnified x100.The result is something that just feels so over the top it seems to demean so much of the character work that goes on here. It also feels a bit demeaning to people who suffer abuse. I feel like people could be equally as affected and pained in their ongoing life for so much less. The author feels the need to take the abuse to such freakish levels here that it just feels insulting in a way I can't quite pin down. As if this is what is required for someone to be so thoroughly negatively impacted in their life. Or that we, as readers, could not actually empathize with someone if the horrors inflicted on them weren't so over the top.
354 of 389 people found the following review helpful. A Little Life By KarenRachel I finished A Little Life in late January and can't stop thinking about it. It is the best book I have ever read about trauma and abuse and is one of the best books I have ever read. It is a brutal book, a deeply wrenching, beautiful book. It is a gentle book with not one false step in its characterization of a young man, Jude, trying to live fully, deeply, morally while haunted and debased by childhood sexual abuse. Sometimes I read in short spurts too disturbed to continue and too teary to see the page and at other times I read late into the night unable to tear myself away. At times I could barely breathe while reading and not just during the horrific descriptions of abuse but also while witnessing the love that Jude's friend and mentors and lover have for him. The author is brilliant at the getting the details right. Whether it is a description of a sumptuous meal, a day at the office, a fight between friends or an everyday conversation it is completely described. I love that A Little Life is so ordinary and extraordinary at the same time and not showy or flashy or manipulative which could easily happen given itsthemes. It is one of the hardest books I have ever read and it is one of the most humane. I thank Edelweiss for giving me this opportunity to read and review A Little Life.
260 of 289 people found the following review helpful. A Reading Experience That Truly Consumed Me By Sarah's Book Shelves I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher (via Netgalley) in exchange for review on my blog.I confess that I had no idea what I was getting into when I started A Little Life. I basically thought it was going to be a male version of The Interestings. And, there are similarities, but A Little Life is much, much darker. It's disturbing, harrowing, relentless, and powerful, but also portrays a strong, hopeful version of friendship. The writing is absolutely gorgeous and it will most likely end up on my Best Books of 2015 list come December.There is nothing little about A Little Life. In fact, it's such a sprawling book that I had trouble distilling my thoughts into a coherent review. Yanagihara threw the kitchen sink at this thing, but she made everything work together seamlessly. To varying degrees, she addressed class, race, sexuality, disability, life purpose / career, secrets, mental issues, and abuse...all overlaid on a foundation of enduring friendship. And, she made all this seem harmoniously complex instead of frustratingly complicated.The lifeblood of this novel is the characters. The four friends met in college, come from disparate backgrounds, and have varying life ambitions. The beginning of the book focuses on introducing each character in bits and pieces (hint: keep a list of key background information on each character as you learn it, because it's hard to keep them straight initially). As the story goes on, Jude becomes the focal point. He's kind, heartbreaking, proud, tough, and maddening. He's a character unlike any other I've encountered in fiction and will stick with me for a long time.I realize that this review is a bit light on plot details and that's intentional. Part of the reading experience, and this book truly is an experience, is peeling back the layers of the characters and gradually understanding what's shaped who they are. Rather, I think the best way to convey the essence of this book is to share the author's thoughts on her writing experience...because I sort of felt the same way reading the book.For one thing, the experience of writing this book was so depleting, so exhausting, so unexpectedly life-altering—as pretentious as that sounds—that I’m still extricating myself from its universe. - Hanya Yanagihara, Slate MagazineWell, I'm still extricating myself and I finished it almost a week ago! A Little Life so consumed me that I had to follow it with a "recovery book" before reading anything else remotely serious.As you can probably guess, A Little Life is definitely not for everyone. It's a great choice for people who appreciate consuming, emotional reading experiences (me!). But, I would avoid it if you prefer the lighter, happier stuff.Check out my blog, Sarah's Book Shelves, for more reviews.
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