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3.79 AVERAGE
3.79 AVERAGE
adventurous
dark
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
reflective
slow-paced
dark
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
All quietus on the western front: and that was that. Charlie minus her mice puts out to sea and to what? Hanya Yanighara doesn’t answer, and we’re supposed to make up our own minds, but given the tangled threads of the preceding 700 pages, that’s a big ask of the reader.
Not quite the sprawling, gruelling test of character that was A Little Life, To Paradise is still quite sprawling and gruelling. Three main strands blend: an alt-past America in the 1890s where homosexual relations were legalised early and gays could marry and have children; a recent Hawaii whose indigenous people struggles to come to terms with colonisation and appropriation; and a near-future world ravaged by disease and climate change, where a totalitarian regime is reshaping its part of the dismembered US. These are interwoven by characters with the same names and some of the same characteristics, to the point that one begins to wonder, part way in, if it’ll turn out to be about time travel: Hanya gets all sci-fi on your ass.
It takes resolve, a Thermos flask of coffee and a fair bit of time to get through this, in part because there is zero humour in the telling, and stylistically it’s freighted with its own sense of being A Great Novel. And a big question throughout is what’s it all for? I felt similar for its predecessor, a book that takes a long time to make - mostly fairly elegantly - the not very original point that everyone suffers in their own way. With this though, I’m less clear: is it a plea for sexual tolerance, individual diversity of living, or freedom from state imposition of health-related restrictions? I ended up having the most affinity for the least sympathetic character, whose initial noble intentions of preventing pandemics and helping the human race are, apparently, subverted by the very state he serves. Or are they, because we never see the state’s actors at play?
Flashbacks to a term spent studying Nineteen Eighty Four for Eng Lit A level abounded, and there’s also some sense that the renaissance of Margaret Atwood through the televising of Handmaid just as she published her sequel must have influenced this. And although the author’s friends have been quick to declare that work started on To Paradise before 2020, it seems a very neat coincidence indeed that the lockdowns, social controls and state funding poured into vaccines is so recent in our memory.
Much of it is a gripping read, albeit somewhat tetchily (“now what’s she doing?”) interrupted by some of Yanighara’s less organised discursive passages (making and consuming a meal takes on Trollopian complexity, and one section, an ineffectual father’s lament to his lost son is as turgid as a cassava after a rainstorm). What does work, and it’s your choice if you take on the whole novel to get to them, are the passages where in particular Charles, one of the architects of the repression that’s used to keep disease, heat and hunger in check, ponders whether it’s been worth it: the extinguishing of human rights, checks on personal freedoms, and the burying of memory, language, even individual names for things so that people can no longer talk of them. Given what we’ve been through, and what we are likely to face next, well may he wonder.
★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆
Not quite the sprawling, gruelling test of character that was A Little Life, To Paradise is still quite sprawling and gruelling. Three main strands blend: an alt-past America in the 1890s where homosexual relations were legalised early and gays could marry and have children; a recent Hawaii whose indigenous people struggles to come to terms with colonisation and appropriation; and a near-future world ravaged by disease and climate change, where a totalitarian regime is reshaping its part of the dismembered US. These are interwoven by characters with the same names and some of the same characteristics, to the point that one begins to wonder, part way in, if it’ll turn out to be about time travel: Hanya gets all sci-fi on your ass.
It takes resolve, a Thermos flask of coffee and a fair bit of time to get through this, in part because there is zero humour in the telling, and stylistically it’s freighted with its own sense of being A Great Novel. And a big question throughout is what’s it all for? I felt similar for its predecessor, a book that takes a long time to make - mostly fairly elegantly - the not very original point that everyone suffers in their own way. With this though, I’m less clear: is it a plea for sexual tolerance, individual diversity of living, or freedom from state imposition of health-related restrictions? I ended up having the most affinity for the least sympathetic character, whose initial noble intentions of preventing pandemics and helping the human race are, apparently, subverted by the very state he serves. Or are they, because we never see the state’s actors at play?
Flashbacks to a term spent studying Nineteen Eighty Four for Eng Lit A level abounded, and there’s also some sense that the renaissance of Margaret Atwood through the televising of Handmaid just as she published her sequel must have influenced this. And although the author’s friends have been quick to declare that work started on To Paradise before 2020, it seems a very neat coincidence indeed that the lockdowns, social controls and state funding poured into vaccines is so recent in our memory.
Much of it is a gripping read, albeit somewhat tetchily (“now what’s she doing?”) interrupted by some of Yanighara’s less organised discursive passages (making and consuming a meal takes on Trollopian complexity, and one section, an ineffectual father’s lament to his lost son is as turgid as a cassava after a rainstorm). What does work, and it’s your choice if you take on the whole novel to get to them, are the passages where in particular Charles, one of the architects of the repression that’s used to keep disease, heat and hunger in check, ponders whether it’s been worth it: the extinguishing of human rights, checks on personal freedoms, and the burying of memory, language, even individual names for things so that people can no longer talk of them. Given what we’ve been through, and what we are likely to face next, well may he wonder.
★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆
This book started out so strong, but by the end I felt like I was ready for it to be over. Don't get me wrong, Hana Yanagihara's prose is perfect nd lyrical at times, there's just a lot going on in this book.
What to say?? I certainly didn’t love this start to finish (though applying the term “uneven”here feels dumb because yeah, it’s uneven, that’s the point) but I’m awarding five stars on the basis of it being so ambitious and unlike anything I’ve ever read. Parts of it were bad, and parts were slow. But you get the sense that most of that is intentional, used to create an *experience*, and on that count it succeeded for me. This novel is really three unconnected novels, linked by motifs, themes, and common character names rather than by actual characters or cause and effect or anything normal. Two (or maybe all?) of them are stories from alternate timelines, 100 years apart, and their mashing together creates such an eerie, specific mood. The last section is definitely the strongest, but you get the sense it would work less well without the two narratives that precede it. Yanagihara crafts the stories around 3 characters who do not have much “main character energy”—they are powerless, bored, incapable in some major way, not very smart, completely reliant on others. And yet it works. I recommend it if you want to read something really long and really weird.
dark
emotional
mysterious
reflective
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
Compelling writing but bleak AF. And why was this formatted as one book? Especially since the middle does not fit with the others.
VERY depressing and was kinda frustrated with the bland, neutral retelling. clear to me that the story is tied through wealth inequity and social pressures but I don't care enough to continue
To Paradise is three books in one, speculative, and vaguely linked. The first section is set in an alternate 1890s, the next in the 1990s, and the final section, the longest, in the 2090s, all in New York City and in parts, Hawai'i. Each tells a different story, though the characters have the same names, but they all deal with family, possibility, choices, long-term consequences, illness, the nature of love, how people who are different might be loved, and the longing for paradise common to all. Not as emotionally devastating as A Little Life, it is still moving, clever, thought-provoking, evocative, lyrical, and magnificent. A time commitment, to be sure, for lovers of questions rather than answers.