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bloodrive 's review for:
A Little Life
by Hanya Yanagihara
in all honesty, i was considering not giving this book a rating or review at all, mostly because i am deeply conflicted on how i truly feel about it. so i decided to place it sort of in the middle.
had i known the author is not a good person--being a straight, mentally healthy woman who doesn't believe in trigger warnings, who doesn't research about her character's (jude) condition, writing gay trauma porn--i would not have gone through with reading this. alas, i got attached, and here we are.
one thing i really disliked was obviously the excessive triggering content. i personally was not triggered, but the in-depth descriptions that seemed to drag on for several hundred pages made me quite uneasy, to say the least. it felt unnecessary at some parts, and completely overdoing it in others.
aside from that, i thoroughly enjoyed the writing style and the characters themselves. you can't help but get attached to Jude and Willem, curious to follow their life story in fragmented bits and pieces, Yanagihara giving you only so much to quell your hunger, so that you may continue to read on with the same yearning you have 500 pages in as you had when you were only 200 pages in. there were so many intricate details about each character's life that you truly feel as though these imagined people were real beings that have lived and still live today. i had to stop and wonder several times how someone can write this beautifully and elaborately.
this book was encapsulating, disgusting, beautiful, tragic, uncomfortable, eye-opening, and disheartening all at once.
sometimes when i was reading, i felt i would give it 0 stars for the pain and disgust it made me feel. i wanted to throw the book across the room and never look at it again. it was terrible to me in those moments.
at other times, during the Happy Years chapters, i felt as though this was probably the greatest book i have ever had the pleasure of reading. why didn't i read it earlier? how could i have thought this book is anything less than 5 stars?
now i realize that there isn't one feeling to attribute to any one thing. i can love and hate this book at the same time. i can admire Yanagihara's beautiful writing and despise her utter incompetence and fetishization all at the same time.
books are complicated. they're meant to be interpreted on a spectrum that can be thought of as operating on the z-axis. it's not easy, it sometimes seems impossible to explain to others, but it's there, and sometimes you're the only one who gets it.
that's what this book made me feel. i wish my feelings about it were more concrete so i could be confident enough to recommend this book to people without saying "i enjoyed it..but..". i wish i hated it enough to tell people to steer clear of it completely. but i don't, and i can't. i will just have to settle for telling people "this book made me feel an intense wave of emotions constantly and all the time, and it hurt but in a good way and you need to read this if you think you can come out on the other side completely fine afterwards, but it's still going to somehow take a part of you with it."
it was terrible and it was lovely, and i'm only sorry that it was Miss Hanya Yanagihara who was the one to write such a broken masterpiece.
had i known the author is not a good person--being a straight, mentally healthy woman who doesn't believe in trigger warnings, who doesn't research about her character's (jude) condition, writing gay trauma porn--i would not have gone through with reading this. alas, i got attached, and here we are.
one thing i really disliked was obviously the excessive triggering content. i personally was not triggered, but the in-depth descriptions that seemed to drag on for several hundred pages made me quite uneasy, to say the least. it felt unnecessary at some parts, and completely overdoing it in others.
aside from that, i thoroughly enjoyed the writing style and the characters themselves. you can't help but get attached to Jude and Willem, curious to follow their life story in fragmented bits and pieces, Yanagihara giving you only so much to quell your hunger, so that you may continue to read on with the same yearning you have 500 pages in as you had when you were only 200 pages in. there were so many intricate details about each character's life that you truly feel as though these imagined people were real beings that have lived and still live today. i had to stop and wonder several times how someone can write this beautifully and elaborately.
this book was encapsulating, disgusting, beautiful, tragic, uncomfortable, eye-opening, and disheartening all at once.
sometimes when i was reading, i felt i would give it 0 stars for the pain and disgust it made me feel. i wanted to throw the book across the room and never look at it again. it was terrible to me in those moments.
at other times, during the Happy Years chapters, i felt as though this was probably the greatest book i have ever had the pleasure of reading. why didn't i read it earlier? how could i have thought this book is anything less than 5 stars?
now i realize that there isn't one feeling to attribute to any one thing. i can love and hate this book at the same time. i can admire Yanagihara's beautiful writing and despise her utter incompetence and fetishization all at the same time.
books are complicated. they're meant to be interpreted on a spectrum that can be thought of as operating on the z-axis. it's not easy, it sometimes seems impossible to explain to others, but it's there, and sometimes you're the only one who gets it.
that's what this book made me feel. i wish my feelings about it were more concrete so i could be confident enough to recommend this book to people without saying "i enjoyed it..but..". i wish i hated it enough to tell people to steer clear of it completely. but i don't, and i can't. i will just have to settle for telling people "this book made me feel an intense wave of emotions constantly and all the time, and it hurt but in a good way and you need to read this if you think you can come out on the other side completely fine afterwards, but it's still going to somehow take a part of you with it."
it was terrible and it was lovely, and i'm only sorry that it was Miss Hanya Yanagihara who was the one to write such a broken masterpiece.