A Little Life
2015
Ratings175
Average rating4.2
15
Ratings175
Average rating4.2
When four classmates from a small Massachusetts college move to New York to make their way, they’re broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition. There is kind, handsome Willem, an aspiring actor; JB, a quick-witted, sometimes cruel Brooklyn-born painter seeking entry to the art world; Malcolm, a frustrated architect at a prominent firm; and withdrawn, brilliant, enigmatic Jude, who serves as their center of gravity. Over the decades, their relationships deepen and darken, tinged by addiction, success, and pride. Yet their greatest challenge, each comes to realize, is Jude himself, by midlife a terrifyingly talented litigator yet an increasingly broken man, his mind and body scarred by an unspeakable childhood, and haunted by what he fears is a degree of trauma that he’ll not only be unable to overcome—but that will define his life forever.
In rich and resplendent prose, Yanagihara has fashioned a tragic and transcendent hymn to brotherly love, a masterful depiction of heartbreak, and a dark examination of the tyranny of memory and the limits of human endurance.
Source: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/239717/a-little-life-by-hanya-yanagihara/
Reviews with the most likes.
This book's a real tearjerker! As other reviewers said though, in parts it might feel forced. I don't mind heavy subject matters, but this would have gotten 5 stars from me only if some of the heaviness was better balanced. E.g. maybe some of Jude's heavy struggles could've been replaced with another character's POV having more defined ups and downs.
I get that the point is to emphasise how isolated Jude feels with his big problems compared to his friends' 'normal' problems, but that concept didn't need to be taken to the extremes that it was. After a point it really was numbing and just piling on struggles didn't add to the emotional impact anymore.
things i liked:
1. beautifully written
2. good representation
things i didn't like:
1. so much shit happened in Jude's childhood, maybe a little too much, made me a bit numb
2. plateaued a little in the middle of the book. while i understand it's meant to be more detail-oriented, it needed a little bit of more momentum from the story line.
3. i just wish Jude was a little bit less self-pitying
4. it felt a little feminine, maybe because it was written by a female author. she didn't understand the male psyche well enough (in my personal opinion)
For the Read Harder Challenge #9, Read the book that's been on your TBR the longest. What a slog, which is probably the reason it's been on my TBR forever. Did not like it at all.
My face is tight with tears drying from my cheeks as I write this review for Hanya's paragon of fiction. A Little Life will be a novel perpetually present in my life - the nuanced lessons changing with each decade. In my 20s, I am reading a novel reflexive of the maturing into ourselves we do during this period. The deep friendships we build our lives around, the friends we keep, then lose, then bring back. Our frustrating inability to fully and appropriately react to those in our lives with different privileges, or those with very few. How piercing it is to see someone we love so incredibly deeply and uniquely unable to ever see what we love about them in themselves.
The novel's focus transformed - like a funnel. First deeply analyzing a unique group of four friends, then pulling forward the two bounded by the most uncertainty in their prior lives, then one. The main character the entire time - Jude. The way Hanya supports the optimistic (and privileged) reader rooting for a character so tortuous left me in a puddle at every major event Hanya delivers. And she delivers these moments in a way that mirrors moments in our lives. I compared my own stories, my own friendships in my 20s with the way she laid out the first quarter of the novel. I can't even imagine what will come when I re-read this novel in my 30s, in my 40s, in my 50s... but I can't imagine crying less.
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