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A Little Life – Hanya Yanagihara

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A Little Life – Hanya Yanagihara Empty A Little Life – Hanya Yanagihara

Post by Graham Mon Mar 11, 2019 7:50 am

It takes a while to settle in to this. The first 100 pages seem to have no narrative just a day by day journal of the lives of four young male friends in New York. Gradually we settle on the inner life of Jude, the quietest of the four whose traumatic past has left him with a legacy of self-harm and painful disability.

This is quite simply the most harrowing book I have ever read. At times the misery and degradation were so intense I could read no more than a page at a time. As a result, it has taken me longer to read than any other novel. At 720 pages you could view it as a massive investment of your time or like The Times reviewer you might ‘wish it was longer.’ It is simultaneously a book about the redemptive capacity of love and its limits.

It is a whole-life novel but Yanagihara takes her time revealing the horrors of Jude’s early life in much the same way as Jude himself hides it from even his closest friends. Her writing is practically flawless, sometimes shocks placed so precisely on the page they will stop you in your tracks. My only quibble is a trope making its way into many modern novels, the withholding of a character’s identity in the opening paragraphs of a chapter. In such skilled hands it is surely deliberate, but the resulting ambiguity is an unkindness to the reader.

This is minor and A Little Life still gets a place in my all-time top ten.

Graham
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