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A review by elderlyemo
A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara
3.0
I feel like writing anything about this book that isn't overwhelmingly profound is like cocking a loaded gun to your temple, but peer pressure made me read and I swear down that peer pressure isn't going to dictate my less than stellar review.
First of all - this is an important book, I get it. It's really well written and for an author to make 800+ pages of really heavy material EASY to read is a feat worthy of 3 stars all in itself, and yeah, maybe as a result I'll pick up other books that they write in the future but this one just wasn't it for me.
It just didn't make me feel anything that I think I was supposed to feel, and whilst I too wanted to rescue Jude from his horrible life, by the end of the book I was just kind of pissed off that no one else had already? There was an awful lot of enabling behaviours from friends, hell, even from professionals, that just kind of pissed me off. I get it right that sometimes terror is relentless and there really is such a thing as an unhappy ending and no sometimes just because you're a good person doesn't mean you're immune to the absolute treachery of the human heart - but SOMEONE PLEASE help this man, because he isn't helping himself.
Maybe the parallels between Jude's life and my own feed into the frustration I had with this book. Maybe I spent so long screaming at him to get up and fight that I missed the point, but when I wasn't pissed off I was, quite frankly - bored.
Could I even name the other characters in this book? Probably not.
I'm happy that this book exists and that it forced a lot of people to have a lot of uncomfortable conversations about their own lives and lifestyles, but this will never be the kind of "voice-of-a-generation" soul bleeder to me that it is to so many others.
And I'm kind of disappointed in that.
First of all - this is an important book, I get it. It's really well written and for an author to make 800+ pages of really heavy material EASY to read is a feat worthy of 3 stars all in itself, and yeah, maybe as a result I'll pick up other books that they write in the future but this one just wasn't it for me.
It just didn't make me feel anything that I think I was supposed to feel, and whilst I too wanted to rescue Jude from his horrible life, by the end of the book I was just kind of pissed off that no one else had already? There was an awful lot of enabling behaviours from friends, hell, even from professionals, that just kind of pissed me off. I get it right that sometimes terror is relentless and there really is such a thing as an unhappy ending and no sometimes just because you're a good person doesn't mean you're immune to the absolute treachery of the human heart - but SOMEONE PLEASE help this man, because he isn't helping himself.
Maybe the parallels between Jude's life and my own feed into the frustration I had with this book. Maybe I spent so long screaming at him to get up and fight that I missed the point, but when I wasn't pissed off I was, quite frankly - bored.
Could I even name the other characters in this book? Probably not.
I'm happy that this book exists and that it forced a lot of people to have a lot of uncomfortable conversations about their own lives and lifestyles, but this will never be the kind of "voice-of-a-generation" soul bleeder to me that it is to so many others.
And I'm kind of disappointed in that.