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chris_chester 's review for:
To Paradise
by Hanya Yanagihara
As a prose stylist, there are few authors out there who can rival Hanya Yanagihara for the depth of fluidity of the written word. There are also few authors I know who have proven so successful while dragging the reader through depressing narratives. Truly an artist of contrasts.
I'll say right off the top that I did not like the fact that this book is three separate and very loosely tangential narratives. They're uneven as far as that goes.
The first is set in an alternate New York in the 1800s feels most representative of the author's rich history of torturing gay male protagonists. The lead David is living the feckless life of a wealthy mediocrity until he becomes absorbed in a romance that will either destroy everything he has and takes for granted or will lead him into a loving paradise he scarcely imagined for himself.
The second narrative bounces between New York again in the 1990s and Hawaii, where a different David is originally from. The story bounces between the two perspectives and illuminates David's childhood and how he wound up where did. This narrative is probably the most depressing.
The third narrative is set in a plague-ridden and climate-ravaged future where successive waves of disease have radically altered the landscape of America. The narrator is Charlie, a young woman in a loveless marriage trying to come to terms with her relationship to her husband and her past. Like the second narrative, flashbacks (this time in the form of letters) illuminate her history through the story of her grandfathers and her father and explain how she came to be where she is and how she is.
This third story is the longest and touching as it does on pandemics feels the most realistic and reachable of the three, as depressing and ominous as it is. There's a thin thread of politics in it, with Yanagihara gesturing at the notion that pandemic lockdowns lead down a slippery slope to concentration camps and authoritarianism. I found myself wishing she had just focused on this narrative, which is already 300+ pages, because I would have liked to know how her other fictional countries seemed to fare a plague-ridden future so much more smoothly. Alas.
If you're going to read this book, do it for the sumptuous prose that allows you to inhabit a fictional present. Don't expect catharsis because you won't find it in any of the three stories. That's kind of the point I think? Paradise is always just over the horizon or some such.
Don't read this book for catharsis because it isn't there. Read it because
I'll say right off the top that I did not like the fact that this book is three separate and very loosely tangential narratives. They're uneven as far as that goes.
The first is set in an alternate New York in the 1800s feels most representative of the author's rich history of torturing gay male protagonists. The lead David is living the feckless life of a wealthy mediocrity until he becomes absorbed in a romance that will either destroy everything he has and takes for granted or will lead him into a loving paradise he scarcely imagined for himself.
The second narrative bounces between New York again in the 1990s and Hawaii, where a different David is originally from. The story bounces between the two perspectives and illuminates David's childhood and how he wound up where did. This narrative is probably the most depressing.
The third narrative is set in a plague-ridden and climate-ravaged future where successive waves of disease have radically altered the landscape of America. The narrator is Charlie, a young woman in a loveless marriage trying to come to terms with her relationship to her husband and her past. Like the second narrative, flashbacks (this time in the form of letters) illuminate her history through the story of her grandfathers and her father and explain how she came to be where she is and how she is.
This third story is the longest and touching as it does on pandemics feels the most realistic and reachable of the three, as depressing and ominous as it is. There's a thin thread of politics in it, with Yanagihara gesturing at the notion that pandemic lockdowns lead down a slippery slope to concentration camps and authoritarianism. I found myself wishing she had just focused on this narrative, which is already 300+ pages, because I would have liked to know how her other fictional countries seemed to fare a plague-ridden future so much more smoothly. Alas.
If you're going to read this book, do it for the sumptuous prose that allows you to inhabit a fictional present. Don't expect catharsis because you won't find it in any of the three stories. That's kind of the point I think? Paradise is always just over the horizon or some such.
Don't read this book for catharsis because it isn't there. Read it because