A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara
5 stars
“You love being in this apartment and in this relationship is because this other person is always making a home for you”
It has been a week since I have finished reading this book and I still don’t know what to think. I don’t think I have all the words needed in order to express what this book did to me and for me. Had a very hard time deciding whether I love this book or I absolutely hate it, there is no in-between. But after sleeping on it I have decided that even though I did not like this book because it’s a tragic book, I can still say that it is an excellent book.
A Little Life follows four college classmates—broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition—as they move to New York in search of fame and fortune. While their relationships, which are tinged by addiction, success, and pride, deepen over the decades, the men are held together by their devotion to the brilliant, enigmatic Jude, a man scarred by an unspeakable childhood trauma.
This book destroyed me, there is no other way of putting it, A little Life is 815 pages of pure suffering (to the point where it became too much for me). I understand why the author wrote this book, I understand that sometimes life is filled with misery, but this book was too much. In 815 pages there is not one single moment of hope, it was so much suffering I had to put it down because I could not bear it any more. This was the reason I hated this book, however, all this suffering was the point of the story so how can I not love a book that was so well written it brought me to tears on multiple occasions and hasn’t left my mind ever since I finished reading it.
The writing in this book is phenomenal, Hanya Yanagihara writes the most beautiful and compelling prose I have ever read. This author, managed to keep me engaged in a really long book that is character driven and left me heartbroken. This book tackles so many difficult subjects such as mental illness, depression, sexuality and disability (please read the trigger warning before you start reading) these subjects are excellently portrayed throughout the story it’s impossible not to be moved by what the author is writing.
The intense emotional pain that I experienced reading this book will forever be marked in my heart, I felt uneasy throughout the whole book and by the end of it I was sobbing uncontrollably. Hanya Yanagihara spears us no mercy when describing the trauma each character had to endure, she breaks your heart over and over again to the point when you have no idea why you keep reading, but you do.
Overall, A Little Life is a hymn to brotherly bonds and a masterful depiction of love in the twenty-first century, this stunning novel is about the families we are born into, and those that we make for ourselves. I have nothing else to say about this book other than it broke me and left me in pieces.
P.S I wanted to see more from Harold and Wilhelm
“As you get older, you realized that really, there were very few people you truly wanted to be around for more than a few days at a time, and yet you were with someone you wanted to be around for years, even when he was at his most opaque and confusing”
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