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A review by jorgechachas
A Little Life: A Novel by Hanya Yanagihara
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
tense
slow-paced
4.5
A Little Life has minimal (if any) plot, and focuses on character development by unfurling the lives of 4 friends, but mostly the life of Jude St. Francis. Every character is well developed, but Jude holds you on edge while you're dying to find something, anything, about his past. When you do, everything starts making more sense.
The chapters are huge, and no matter how meaningless you think a section might be, Yanagihara always proves you wrong by throwing a single paragraph, sentence, or a couple of words that tear into you. Quite often I'd put the book down at a mundane section only to pick it up and read something debilitatingly tragic in the following page. But unfortunately, there were plenty of stints in this 800+ page book where I wished the author would've been more concise or even selective with her writing.
The story is violently depressing. So much so that it lost it's pungency in some sections and regained it in others. I'd be surprised if anyone could finish this book without crying, but it's surprising which moments elicited this response from me.
Many reviewers complain about the book as being nothing more than "trauma-porn" which, I think I wildly unfair and maybe even extremely naïve. Don't get me wrong, you could fill out an entire page of content warnings with everything that happens in this book, but we as readers should consider this: Although A Little Life is a work of fiction, not a single section in this book is unbelievable. In fact, the life described here is a life that someone (or just a small group of people grouped together) has closely experienced.
I'm unsure whether the few issues I have about this book are from a dissatisfaction of the story, or some of it's elements, but there are reasons holding this back from being a 5 star masterpiece in my eyes. These being (SPOILERS):
- An odd depiction of sexuality, but more so - the initially shoe-horned feeling romantic relationship between Willem and Jude that should've been condemned by all that care about either of them from the start, but was only supported. (By the end, the relationship seemed more positive, but this had the potential to ruin the story for me).
- Many of the most important people in Jude's life ultimately being spineless enablers, who couldn't as much as broach a subject.
- The insurmountable amount of money being collected and used, and everyone in the friend group and beyond being violently rich, successful, unrelatable, to the point that anything and everything was always possible without questions. Everyone (sorry to say, this includes Jude) ended up having a level of privilege that makes me roll my eyes; i.e. Jude spending months sick/recovering and finances never being any kind of issues or consideration.
- The aforementioned length of the book, which did in fact have some sections that would've benefited from brevity.
- (Nitpicky) Yanagihara overusing this specific sentence structure in a way that demanded re-reading: "They were friends - well, as much friends as they could've been given the circumstances handed to them by their lives - until then."
But a specific thing I loved about the book was it's progression of time. It was natural in the same way that aging feels as it is happening right now. You don't realize that you've gone from reading about them as 20 year old's to 30, 40, 50. It was extremely well executed.
This is a STRONG 9 out of 10.
The chapters are huge, and no matter how meaningless you think a section might be, Yanagihara always proves you wrong by throwing a single paragraph, sentence, or a couple of words that tear into you. Quite often I'd put the book down at a mundane section only to pick it up and read something debilitatingly tragic in the following page. But unfortunately, there were plenty of stints in this 800+ page book where I wished the author would've been more concise or even selective with her writing.
The story is violently depressing. So much so that it lost it's pungency in some sections and regained it in others. I'd be surprised if anyone could finish this book without crying, but it's surprising which moments elicited this response from me.
Many reviewers complain about the book as being nothing more than "trauma-porn" which, I think I wildly unfair and maybe even extremely naïve. Don't get me wrong, you could fill out an entire page of content warnings with everything that happens in this book, but we as readers should consider this: Although A Little Life is a work of fiction, not a single section in this book is unbelievable. In fact, the life described here is a life that someone (or just a small group of people grouped together) has closely experienced.
I'm unsure whether the few issues I have about this book are from a dissatisfaction of the story, or some of it's elements, but there are reasons holding this back from being a 5 star masterpiece in my eyes. These being (SPOILERS):
- An odd depiction of sexuality, but more so - the initially shoe-horned feeling romantic relationship between Willem and Jude that should've been condemned by all that care about either of them from the start, but was only supported. (By the end, the relationship seemed more positive, but this had the potential to ruin the story for me).
- Many of the most important people in Jude's life ultimately being spineless enablers, who couldn't as much as broach a subject.
- The insurmountable amount of money being collected and used, and everyone in the friend group and beyond being violently rich, successful, unrelatable, to the point that anything and everything was always possible without questions. Everyone (sorry to say, this includes Jude) ended up having a level of privilege that makes me roll my eyes; i.e. Jude spending months sick/recovering and finances never being any kind of issues or consideration.
- The aforementioned length of the book, which did in fact have some sections that would've benefited from brevity.
- (Nitpicky) Yanagihara overusing this specific sentence structure in a way that demanded re-reading: "They were friends - well, as much friends as they could've been given the circumstances handed to them by their lives - until then."
But a specific thing I loved about the book was it's progression of time. It was natural in the same way that aging feels as it is happening right now. You don't realize that you've gone from reading about them as 20 year old's to 30, 40, 50. It was extremely well executed.
This is a STRONG 9 out of 10.