Take a photo of a barcode or cover
homohexual 's review for:
A Little Life
by Hanya Yanagihara
4.5 stars.
Review to come after I stop crying. (I will say that this book isn't nearly as soul-crushingly bleak as I expected--it was even downright boring at times--but it was still very beautiful.)
2024 ETA:
i'm dropping my rating of this book 2 years after the fact because i can recognize when i've been emotionally manipulated by a novel. granted, the whole reason i read novels is to be emotionally manipulated, but sometimes i let the volume of tears i cried act as a replacement for literary merit, and that was very much the case here. i think perhaps it might deserve an even lower star rating, but i can't ignore the impact the end of this story had on me, so it must still count for something.
i stand by what i said regarding the bleakness of the plot: it's soooo over-the-top cruel to jude that it simply can't be taken seriously. i don't quite believe that this qualifies as torture porn, if only because i don't quite believe that jude is supposed to read as a real person. he's an idea. it's easy to abuse a facsimile, an object. i feel like there's something metatextual going on here in yanagihara's destruction of her own character, dehumanizing the concept of a person through a medium that's so effective at humanization. it puts the reader at odds with themselves: do you love jude and hate what's been done to him and wonder what the point of the fucking book is? or do you step away from attachment to the character despite how wrong it feels, and try to read instead a story about the concept of suffering? i don't really know. and i'm not really sure that it makes a difference? this one is hard to wrap my head around, because i read it largely as the first kind of reader in 2022, but hindsight has shifted my opinion towards the second.
i do know that i also stand by what i said about the book being boring. in between all the horrible moments are so many slogs through upper-class tedium. every character is like a satire of the privileged elite, but here i'm less convinced that this is what yanagihara was going for. all i know is that i really didn't care about most of the secondary plots. the scope, following 4 men whose lives intertwine, feels too large for the purpose of the narrative; it doesn't feel enough like a story about friendship to warrant the page time.
maybe one day i'll come back to this and cement all my weird, half-formed thoughts into a review that makes sense, lmao. for now, the only thing i'm absolutely certain of is that anyone calling this book the 'great gay novel' is tone-deaf and tacky. :)))
Review to come after I stop crying. (I will say that this book isn't nearly as soul-crushingly bleak as I expected--it was even downright boring at times--but it was still very beautiful.)
2024 ETA:
i'm dropping my rating of this book 2 years after the fact because i can recognize when i've been emotionally manipulated by a novel. granted, the whole reason i read novels is to be emotionally manipulated, but sometimes i let the volume of tears i cried act as a replacement for literary merit, and that was very much the case here. i think perhaps it might deserve an even lower star rating, but i can't ignore the impact the end of this story had on me, so it must still count for something.
i stand by what i said regarding the bleakness of the plot: it's soooo over-the-top cruel to jude that it simply can't be taken seriously. i don't quite believe that this qualifies as torture porn, if only because i don't quite believe that jude is supposed to read as a real person. he's an idea. it's easy to abuse a facsimile, an object. i feel like there's something metatextual going on here in yanagihara's destruction of her own character, dehumanizing the concept of a person through a medium that's so effective at humanization. it puts the reader at odds with themselves: do you love jude and hate what's been done to him and wonder what the point of the fucking book is? or do you step away from attachment to the character despite how wrong it feels, and try to read instead a story about the concept of suffering? i don't really know. and i'm not really sure that it makes a difference? this one is hard to wrap my head around, because i read it largely as the first kind of reader in 2022, but hindsight has shifted my opinion towards the second.
i do know that i also stand by what i said about the book being boring. in between all the horrible moments are so many slogs through upper-class tedium. every character is like a satire of the privileged elite, but here i'm less convinced that this is what yanagihara was going for. all i know is that i really didn't care about most of the secondary plots. the scope, following 4 men whose lives intertwine, feels too large for the purpose of the narrative; it doesn't feel enough like a story about friendship to warrant the page time.
maybe one day i'll come back to this and cement all my weird, half-formed thoughts into a review that makes sense, lmao. for now, the only thing i'm absolutely certain of is that anyone calling this book the 'great gay novel' is tone-deaf and tacky. :)))