A Little Life

by Hanya Yanagihara

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST

SHORT-LISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE

Brace yourself for the most astonishing, challenging, upsetting, and profoundly moving book in many a season. An epic about love and friendship in the twenty-first century that goes into some of the darkest places fiction has ever traveled and yet somehow improbably breaks through into the light. Truly an amazement—and a great gift for its readers.
 
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cruel Brooklyn-born painter seeking entry to the art world; Malcolm, a frustrated architect at a prominent firm; and withdrawn, brilliant, enigmatic Jude, who serves as their center of gravity.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.

• ISBN10: 8952776380
• ISBN13: 9788952776389
• Publish Date: 16 June 2016 (first published 1 January 2015)
• Publish Status: Unknown
• Imprint: Sigongsa
• Format: Paperback (US Trade)
• Pages: 436
• Language: Korean

Reviews

[roundtableknight]

Rating: 5/5 stars

I have never openly sobbed more than I did while reading the last 100 pages of this book. Everything about this book was so heart wrenching and beautifully written that at times I could convince myself that this was a different type of book; one with a happy ending. There is something about all of these characters I met while reading this book that I will never forget, and more importantly what they resembled about life and the joys and terrors of it.

Is it selfish to say that I don't want anyone to read this book? That the characters feel like a part of me that I don't want exposed for others to preside over and make their own statements about? This book closed the page on me, on who I was before I read this book, and now that I finished it, and I love it even more for that reason. If you do end up reading this, I warm you that you will see both the best and most selfless characters in this book, and more wicked and bilious as well, but that is life, is it not?

[Michael @ Knowledge Lost]

A Little Life is a novel about the lifelong friendship of four classmates from a Massachusetts liberal arts college. After college, Willem (an actor), JB (an artist), Malcolm (an architect) and Jude (a lawyer) move to New York to begin their lives. The novel begins by following the friends through their lives and careers and the shifting dynamics of the group. However, Jude becomes the primary focus as we learn about his horrifying backstory.

I am of two minds with this novel; first of all, there are some very important issues explored within A Little Life. I am sure many people have been told about the high amount of trigger warnings that come with this book, dealing with depression, abuse, self-mutilation and so much more. It was nice to explore friendship that are not just a group of heterosexual men. The book itself explore so many issues and I got to a point where I wanted to yell at the friends of Jude, telling them to get mental health first aid certificate, and learn how to handle the situation better.

This brings me to all the problems I had with A Little Life; for starters, I felt like Hanya Yanagihara was just piling all the worst situations onto the character of Jude to a point where it was just getting ridiculous. I understand that some people have suffered a lot but in proportion to everyone else in the book, Jude just has to suffer through it all. I began to hate this aspect of the book to the point where if this was not a library book I would have thrown the novel across the room. Everyone focuses on how wonderful this book was for dealing with so many issues, and I agree, but if we dealt with these issues more regularly in fiction and the media then this book would not get the same amount of attention. I found the writing very flat and boring, it was dull. It became a real chore to read through the novel but I was determined to finish A Little Life for the themes.

Congratulations on Hanya Yanagihara for writing a novel that is dealing with so many important issues. A Little Life is great for this and I hope it paves the way for literature in the future. I hope this will begin a shift from the norm where we are constantly reading about white heterosexual males where there only problem is their own self destructive nature (even if I enjoy that in fiction). A Little Life is the crowd favourite to win the Man Booker prize but I really hope it does not win. There is better literature in the short-list, and I do not think A Little Life is a good representation of what they consider ‘good’ fiction.

This review originally appeared on my blog; http://www.knowledgelost.org/literature/book-reviews/genre/contemporary/a-little-life-by-hanya-yanagihara/

[nightingalereads]

I don't have many words for this book, except to say that it was a masterpiece. At times the story was draining and traumatizing and hard to read, but I loved it wholeheartedly. The characters were so real. Two of them in particular stole (and repeatedly broke) my heart. There might've been a few shortcomings that I missed, but if I love the characters, then those usually cease to matter to me. Such an exhausting, sad, and beautiful book. Not one that will ever leave me.