ombraluce 's review for:

To Paradise by Hanya Yanagihara

5.0

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A strange, highly engaging novel, in which, with a prestidigitator's skill, the author exploits many of the modes of speculative fiction. It starts with the uchrony of the first part, set immediately after the American War of Secession, from which two confederations of states emerge: the rich northern states, extremely classist but in which certain personal freedoms are safeguarded (such as same-sex marriage, central to the events). The second part takes place at the time of the beginning of the HIV epidemic and features the last descendant of one of Hawaii's dynastic families who, in order to escape his father's madness and follow his own nature, emigrates to the United States to become the toy boy of a rich lawyer. The third part is entirely dystopian and takes place in a future shaped by epidemics, in which the United States has become an authoritarian state that completely controls the lives of its citizens, to the point of sterilising those who dare raise a voice in protest. Three parts that feature characters with the same name, leaving the reader to speculate what the real links are, personal and temporal, and recurring places, fixed points in the narrative, whose evolution is always interrupted just a step away from paradise.