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jjaylynny 's review for:
To Paradise
by Hanya Yanagihara
Seven years since A Little Life? Seven years since my heart felt torn out by that maddening, manipulative, wonderful novel? So, okay. Right on time to pull my innards out again.
Yanagihara makes us work, and I like that, but it certainly hurts a lot. My brain was working on many levels: differing styles matching differing time frames and narrative genre, whirling with trying to fit the characters with the same names to their predecessors even when there were no familial connections, only thematic ones, and in the last section, dealing with the literary urgency and the horror that our pandemic-land mirrors with the author's late 21st century New York City.
The big questions: what makes a life? what makes a life worth living? how do we make our freedom or the denial of our freedom anything more than a piece of dust? should we try?
Yanagihara makes us work, and I like that, but it certainly hurts a lot. My brain was working on many levels: differing styles matching differing time frames and narrative genre, whirling with trying to fit the characters with the same names to their predecessors even when there were no familial connections, only thematic ones, and in the last section, dealing with the literary urgency and the horror that our pandemic-land mirrors with the author's late 21st century New York City.
The big questions: what makes a life? what makes a life worth living? how do we make our freedom or the denial of our freedom anything more than a piece of dust? should we try?