Sporadic Book Review #5
Book 'I’ve still lost count, but I’m trying’
A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara
Trigger Warning: This book contains detailed descriptions of physical and sexual abuse and the trauma that comes along with it. This review does not contain any such descriptions.
I picked this book up and said, “go ahead, break my heart, there’s so much more I can take.” I was wrong, I could not possibly have anticipated the amount of angst and heartbreak this book would cause. Based on the reviews I’d read earlier, I knew that this was going to be a heavy read, and I’m here to confirm that this is indeed a very very heavy read.
A Little Life narrates the story of four lives, whose journey we begin seeing from their college years. Told in the third person, the book makes you feel like you’re watching these lives unfold on a movie screen in the depths of your imagination. Yanagihara’s writing is as cinematic as it is nuanced. I’ve rarely read a book that captures the details of the every day and the mundane so profoundly. The book justifies its 700-page length by showing you why the details matter so much. So rarely does a book rooted in realism make you feel like you are one of the protagonists witnessing the lives of others unfold rather than the usual of you being a detached, if not dispassionate reader. Yanagihara’s writing transports you physically and emotionally to the spaces held by these protagonists.
Very briefly, the book follows the life of Jude St. Francis, Jean-Baptiste “JB” Marion, Willem Ragnarsson, and Malcolm Irvine, with the story largely being focussed on the first three characters and with Jude being the thread that connects all the characters of the story. Jude is a lawyer, Willem an actor, JB an artist, and Malcolm an architect. It is not just a story about who they are but also how they become who they are. Yanagihara not only talks about these characters as people whose motions of life we are reading about but also uses uncharacteristically explicit descriptions of what it means to be a lawyer, an actor, an artist, and an architect. The fears and apprehensions of young adults, the almost mid-life crises of your thirties, the vagaries of your forties, the ordinaries of your fifties are all things Yanagihara captures in this tome. And in doing so, she provides something for every reader to take away from the book whilst the book takes away so much from you as a reader.
Possibly one of the heavyweights of the misery literature genre, the book does defy its common tropes in ways that I wouldn’t say are unexpected, but also not something you’d anticipate. The book constantly keeps you on the edge of wanting to know what has happened and what happens next, while also simultaneously keeping you grounded in the contemporaneity of the characters.
A Little Life is exactly what the book’s title says it is and yet, so much more: it is particular about showing you every small thing that constitutes living our lives while showing you the intensity of the larger questions of life, love, death, and everything in between to demonstrate their bearing on our everyday living.
There are so many lines in the book that stick with you long after you are done reading. So many questions about how society deems certain things acceptable and others not, that leave you grappling with your own anxieties. So many plot lines that resonate so deeply with your loneliness that you don’t just empathize with the characters, you actually become them — living their lives in your skin, seeing your life in their existence. I don’t think words, the same words Yanagihara uses to bring to life her characters, are adequate to capture the emotions they evoke. I feel any review of this book would be painfully short of truly expressing what it made me feel. The book is an experience, is all I can say while emphatically recommending it.
