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To Paradise by Hanya Yanagihara
5.0

To Paradise will break your heart by highlighting humanity’s weaknesses across three hundred years.

It’s a book made for a book club. Begging to be discussed. Those who love to dive into the themes of time, progress, hope, relationships, fear, and politics will have plenty to mull over. It offers commentary on the state of the world but remains detached through the fiction. Each jerk forward in time produces a chasm that the reader feels compelled to fill in. At times the lack of resolutions are frustrating. The unexplained details whisper questions throughout the novel and I found the things Yanagihara left to be the loudest.

The first section of the book takes place in 1894. Here there is an alternate history of North America, where the continent is fractured into multiple colonies and unions - with New York being a part of The Free States - a place where racial freedom persists, as well as freedom of sexuality. The implications of this swap in history immediately grabbed my attention but is glossed over as the characters and their wealthy lives take over. With gender not being an issue with who you love, we are presented with class and wealth filling the void, and insecurity, alway insecurity.

In part two, we pick up in 1994 in the same townhome that we entered in part one, but with a different gay couple. Here we are faced with the struggles of a wealthy older man and his younger, less successful partner. The older man entertains and cares for his friends who are succumbing to AIDS, while the younger one tries to find his place in his partner’s world, while secretly deconstructing his childhood trauma’s created by his mentally-unwell father.

As the book ends, we are in future New York City. Global warming has forced everyone into wearing cooling suits to go outside. Sexual freedom has been pushed into the closet, for the first time there in 200 years. Government oppression, global pandemics, fake news, supply chain shortages, and isolationism take center stage - not too much of a stretch from today. A man’s love is shown to his granddaughter and his best friend through a series of actions and letters. Each vignette illustrates the man trying to cope with the responsibility he bears from creating this hostile world that is trying to destroy them.

To Paradise was very different to A Little Life (Yanagihara’s previous novel which made me openly sob). It reminded me of Cloud Atlas in terms of structure and style - but instead of vague allusions to reincarnation, we are connected over the centuries by loosely related characters all struggling to overcome something in order to find their own escape to paradise.

While reading, I’d think, “This is definitely my least favorite part so far,” only to return in awe by the ideas it challenged in the end. The way the past and future echo each other throughout each section gives the reader a unique perspective, an omnipresent context, that focuses the themes of the novel. Yanagihara is a brilliant writer. My copy of To Paradise is marked up by so many passages underlined so I can read them over again. The novel is not short. At 704 pages it’s daunting, but the way it flows, I was able to read it in less than 10 days.

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