A Little Life MP3 CD – Unabridged, November 3, 2015

There are so many things I loved about this book, countered by so many things I hated. Yet, the beauty I saw in my head in the “happy years” and the emotions I felt, terrible and tragic, overcame the things I disliked about it. Leaving me thinking about this book nearly every single hour, every single day for the past month. Coincidentally, falling in love with it. Whilst horribly missing and feeling a sense of loss towards Willem and Jude. Though I thought some characters were 1 dimensional, I believe their two amazing characters had so much depth and personality that they shown against the others, making it worth while. I think some minor descriptions got repetitive and sometimes boring, which made it harder to get through the 814 pages, but in the end it was worth it. The final chapter was absolutely amazing, I have never read something that made me this emotional, all whilst tying up the text perfectly. I was able to recognize the many different meanings behind the title of the book, which was a heartbreaking experience for some of them, but I always love figuring out the titles significance to the text itself. Which this book does very well on. Now some reviews hate on this book for its continuous graphic content and repetitive unlikeness of Jude’s life. However I never felt this way. Sure it was hard to get through many sections about Jude’s past. But I don’t think they are used just to make us feel terrible. The created a story one in which we saw Jude carrying such weight for the 53 years of his life. One which that affected everything he did and everyone we loved. It did this in a way I haven’t seen a book do. And with the unlikeness of the events all happening in his life. Sure maybe every horrible thing that happened to him seemed unbelievable because how many traumatic things can happen to one guy? But how I saw it was, these things DO happen to people. R*pe, p*dophilia, s*x trafficking, kidnapping, car accidents, abusive relationships, loss, depression; and all of the other things Jude experienced. It’s not like someone who faces trauma in their life, only has one event happen and the rest of their lives runs smoothly. I also saw how Jude could be representing so many different people and different life experiences. For this reason this didn’t make it unbelievable to me in any way. The only way it is if you stay for narrowed and head on with the book, rather then thinking about bigger context; the issues in todays world, what people experience, and how he was a representation, representing all sorts of people in one character. It’s if I saw Jude as almost a metaphor. People also disagreed on the other extremity’s that took place, but on the other spectrum; success. All of the characters have an arch in their careers and all become super successful in their particular field. Even Jude, although he has had set back after set back. I think if the author had given Jude a mediocre life, or not have found his friends, and Harold and Julia, his adoptive parents, his career and life, he would have not made it as long as he did. Because mind me again, these things do happen to people, and are very hard to overcome. So Yanahigara, of course gave him this beautiful life, and all of his friends one. Too. But let’s not say it was without struggle. Jude struggles everyday with trauma and sadness, topped with self hatred, Jb struggled with a drug addiction, Willem didn’t get gig after gig and wondered about his competence, Malcolm didn’t make it for a while, under the pressure of his parents. Like real life there were setbacks for all of them, before they made it big. And what is unrealistic about making it big, when one you are passionate about what you love and two you went to a good university? I think it’s unfair to these people’s characters to say their lives became unrealistic either on the traumatic aspect or the success. Because success does in-fact happen for people too. Sure both may have seem over the top, but I also never felt this way. It was if the book was written to have two extremes on the spectrum, and show that even a beautiful life that is so big and grand full of everything anyone could want, received and deserved, not given, cannot heal such trauma from one’s life, making only but a little life.

I’ll be blunt upfront. A LITTLE LIFE (2015) by Hanya Yanagihara is the most soul-wrenching novel I have perhaps ever read. In the novel Yanagihara follows in minute detail the lives of four men who become friends, “a clique,” in college and continue to be close into their late fifties. JB Marion begins his work life as a “receptionist at a small but influential magazine based in SoHo that covered the downtown art scene,” with ambitions to become an artist. Fatherless since he was three, JB is of Haitian descent, tends toward being overweight, and is gay. Willem Ragnarsson, handsome and “liked by everyone” starts out as a waiter, but has his eye set on becoming a professional actor on stage and screen. In ways, Malcolm Irvine is the outlier of the group, still living at home with his parents who are a couple of mixed-race. He is wealthy and determined to become an architect. Malcolm appears to be oblivious of his appeal to others, even naïve, somewhat confused about his sexuality, and unmindful of his financial situation although generous to his friends and others when they are in need. At the core of the four friends is Jude St. Francis who holds the group together—not so much by what he does even though he is considerably bright, loyal, and hard-working, as well as determined to become a prosecutor, but because his friends care about him and Jude has needs. Parentless and with a mysterious past all of which he never speaks about and never having “a girlfriend or a boyfriend,” Jude has trouble with his legs and is frequently in pain. Although he never complains nor asks for help, his friends are very aware of his situation and go out of their way to assist Jude in as tactful of a manner as possible.Mainly set in New York City, as A LITTLE LIFE unfolds, Yanagihara brings into the fold other characters of importance including a doctor, Andy Contractor, and a former law professor, Harold Stein and his wife Judy, all of whom play important roles in in the novel, as well as a host of minor characters. It is, however, the four friends who remain central to the story, especially Jude and Willem, roommates in college and who remain the closest of the friends. The bulk of Yanagihara’s novel is told in chronicle order, but as the novel progresses, there are more flashbacks and memories, some of which get repeated with added detail as they surface, most of them revolving around Jude who becomes more and more the novel’s central character.When thinking about tragic characters in prose fiction, no one comes my mind as being more tragic than Jude Fawley from Thomas Hardy’s JUDE THE OBSCURE (1894/1895) which may be the motivation for the author’s name for her main character—Jude, “the patron saint of lost causes.” Although readers soon come to the realization Jude is a physically and emotionally scarred individual, Yanagihara’s revelations about the details of Jude’s history are painfully slow in coming—mirroring the complexity and rawness of those very memories which haunt and torment Jude. They are memories which have shaped, or rather distorted, his life. In one flashback the author reveals twenty-five years in the past, Ana, Jude's now deceased “first and only social worker” warning Jude during a hospital stay, “…you have to talk about these things while they’re fresh. Or you’ll never talk about them… and it’s going to fester inside you, and you’re always going to think you’re to blame. You’ll be wrong, of course, but you’ll always think it.”There are relatively few highs in Jude’s life and when they occur, the reader is bound to find them tearful moments of joy. The increasingly close friendship between Jude and Willem with both of them at the zenith of their careers is complex—filled paradoxically with the bounty which human relationships can contain along with enormous peril. Unfortunately, most of Jude’s life is a series of unrelenting, dreadful, terrifying, shattering lows and betrayals accompanied by self-destructive impulses which become worse and worse, adding to a man’s already burdensome childhood, youth, and life-long post-traumatic stress. Jude’s is a portrait of suffering beyond comprehension and the brutal perpetrators of his torments throughout his life are the epitome of unfathomable, monstrous human behavior.Thus, A LITTLE LIFE does not make for easy reading. It is emotionally jolting and at the same time riveting. So vivid are Yanagihara’s expose of the quartet of characters, the reader becomes one with them, making it a quintet. The author’s characters are real to life, the dialogue is vivid and genuine, and the quality of the writing as well as the tone of the novel is unswerving. Although Yanagihara’s central characters meet with sometimes staggering personal and professional successes, there are also failures and tragedies, both past and present, and always a dire cloud which encircles them all, especially Jude. Due to her immense and encompassing narrative skills, readers will eventually brace themselves so that whenever a horrifying revelation is made about Jude’s secret past or his present, there is likely worse to come.A narrative trick Yanagihara pulls a little over a quarter of the way into the novel and again at the half-way point, moving from an omniscient narrator to what clearly is a first person although not readily identifiable narrator, is bound to strike the reader as both curious and possibly even portentous. It is left up to the reader to recognize and interpret for themselves the meaning of the author’s temporary changes in point of view. She does the same switch near the book’s conclusion which eventually brings the work to its shocking climax and even more emotionally numbing, traumatic end.Clearly, A LITTLE LIFE is not for everyone. even though the novel is a modern masterpiece of writing and prose fiction and a work which will haunt the reader for a long time. The most resilient reader may very likely find there are times when they simply must close the book and exit the bleakness of the world Yanagihara creates before picking the book up again. Others may discover there are times when they simply want to throw the book across the room. Some readers may find the book impossible to finish because it is so emotionally draining. Regardless of the reader’s reaction to the novel, A LITTLE LIFE is an incredible accomplishment and a work which haunt the reader for a long time.[NOTES: (1) A LITTLE LIFE has recently been declared one of “The 20 Best Novels of the Decade” by Emily Temple for The Literary Hub on December 23, 2019. (2) The book’s cover photo is from a series of photos taken in the 1960s by Peter Hujar. The photo is titled “Orgasmic Man.” The photo is purposefully ambiguous. Is the man depicted experiencing joy or pain? (3) A stage adaptation of A LITTLE LIFE ran in Amsterdam in 2018 and 2019 with limited runs, only, most of which were in Dutch.]