A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara – 720 pages
Book Blurb:
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cruel Brooklyn-born painter seeking entry to the art world; Malcolm, a frustrated architect at a prominent firm; and withdrawn, brilliant, enigmatic Jude, who serves as their center of gravity.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.
My Review: 5 stars
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It’s been a week since I finished A Little Life, which will be a future literary classic, and have finally navigated through my myriad of thoughts, that I can now write about it. I also realized that this book is hard to review with out giving too much away, so I’ll do my best with no spoilers.
The title, A Little Life, is such a double entendre, as the lives of these main characters, most especially Jude, are so far from little. The width, depth and breadth of these men’s emotions are written about with such raw and heart wrenching emotion that at times I knew things I felt I shouldn’t. To be included in their secrets, appearances, misappropriated judgments, challenges, self-inflictions, physical and emotional pains, joys, sex lives, burdens, passions, maddening self- psycho-babble and ultimately undying friendship was an overwhelming reading experience.
This book is not easy to read. I had to stop every hundred pages or so to be released from the grip the story held on me. There is much sadness in this book but also much love, though it comes from unexpected places. I was told by a publishing house rep that the author would “slit her wrists” before the book’s cover was changed. Once the reader figures out who the cover represents, the irony of the portrait’s title is flawless. This is a reader’s read and one that is certain to be discussed for much time to come.
Quotes I liked:
Wasn’t friendship its own miracle, the finding of another person who made the entire lonely world seem somehow less lonely?”
“They all—Malcolm with his houses, Willem with his girlfriends, JB with his paints, he with his razors—sought comfort, something that was theirs alone, something to hold off the terrifying largeness, the impossibility, of the world, of the relentlessness of its minutes, its hours, its days.”
-“Friendship, companionship: it so often defied logic, so often eluded the deserving, so often settled itself on the odd, the bad, the peculiar, the damaged.”
-“I admired how she knew, well before I did, that the point of a child is not what you hope he will accomplish in your name but the pleasure that he will bring you, whatever form it comes in, even if it is a form that is barely recognizable as pleasure at all – and more important, the pleasure you will be privileged to bring him.”
-“But what was happiness but an extravagance, an impossible state to maintain, partly because it was so difficult to articulate?”
-“The only trick of friendship, I think, is to find people who are better than you are—not smarter, not cooler, but kinder, and more generous, and more forgiving—and then to appreciate them for what they can teach you, and to try to listen to them when they tell you something about yourself, no matter how bad—or good—it might be, and to trust them, which is the hardest thing of all. But the best, as well.”
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I have heard many great reviews of this book, but am a bit hesitant to dive in given the heavy emotional content. Do you have any suggestions on how to approach? Is this perhaps a book not for everyone?
Thanks.
Laura, great question. This book is not for everyone as there is a good measure of darkness in the book. Physical abuse, self inflicted abuse and some gruesome medicinal related scenes are depicted. My best advice would be to start it! If it’s not your cup of tea, close it and move in to something else. Trust me though, there is equal amount of light and love throughout the story as well.