A Little Life in Queereaders

Jul 20, 2019 Andy rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: recommendations, lgbtq, best-audiobook-narrations

I’m so sorry, but I don’t know where to begin, so let’s start with some facts.

Fact: I’ve spent the past two weeks utterly consumed by this novel in a way that hasn’t happened since I read the entire Harry Potter series in six months.

Fact: I’ve cried more, both happy and sad tears, the past few days than I probably have in my entire adult life.

Fact: My sleep schedule was destroyed as I tossed and turned at night analyzing what I read earlier in the day, which speaks to the power of Hanya Yanag ...more

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Dec 01, 2014 Dana rated it really liked it

Shelves: made-me-cry, lgbt, netgalley

I have mixed feelings about this book. On the one hand, I cared very much for the two main characters, Jude and Willem, and cried (multiple times) at the end. Usually if a book makes me cry it automatically gets 5 stars, but problems with the book's structure and plot kept me from truly loving this one.

The book's description calls it a "hymn to brotherly love" but really it's a romance between Jude and Willem. I loved how close they are, even before their friendship becomes romantic, and how com ...more

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Apr 14, 2016 Craig Laurance rated it liked it

A tale of two novels

A Little Life starts out as a bildungsroman. Its milleu, of 4 highly educated, multiracial people more or less on the gay side of the Kinsey scale is witty and rings true. It’s a mélange of workplace struggles, fabulous soirees, bad apartments and sexual experimentation. Then, about 200 pages in, it turns into a Lemony Snicket-styled book for adults, full of abuse and suffering. The two modes of storytelling, however, don’t mesh. Yanagihara’s scene setting is so meticulous—do A tale of two novels

A Little Life starts out as a bildungsroman. Its milleu, of 4 highly educated, multiracial people more or less on the gay side of the Kinsey scale is witty and rings true. It’s a mélange of workplace struggles, fabulous soirees, bad apartments and sexual experimentation. Then, about 200 pages in, it turns into a Lemony Snicket-styled book for adults, full of abuse and suffering. The two modes of storytelling, however, don’t mesh. Yanagihara’s scene setting is so meticulous—down to describing what people eat and their apartments—that the intrusion of Dickensian (heading towards Grand Guginol) excess is odd.

****SPOILERS****

Mind you, the writing about self-loathing and self-harm is powerful and ghastly and gorgeous. It just doesn’t seem to belong to the first conception of the novel. Furthermore, the history of the lead character, Jude, is downright surreal. I had a hard time believing that a pugilistic lawyer who made enough money to live in a Soho warehouse with a private swimming pool, who was also a master baker and sang lieder and had a post graduate degree in pure mathematics came from such ghoulish circumstances—a foundling raised by pedophilic monks, then a child sex slave, then a teenage hustler, and finally, a victim of a Silence of the Lambs styled sicko. Oh, he also suffers from blistering pain that requires him to use a wheelchair sometimes, and he cuts himself to ribbons with regular frequency. My problem wasn’t with the hopelessness of the story, which some people call “tragedy porn”. It was with the logistics. The problem is, in Yanagihira’s complex, detailed novel, there wasn’t a single scene of Jude learning how to bake or being a lawyer, so you don't really see how he is supposed to pull off the Tough Lawyer by day/wounded self-destructive boy by night balancing act. Also unbelievable was the patience his enabling friends had for Jude. I know real life people who are a whole lot less damaged than Jude who try people’s patience. Only his friend JB is strong enough not to put up with his crap—and JB is painted in a bad light.

Despite the flaws, A Little Life did keep me reading. The prose was great if a little overwrought sometimes, and was even suspenseful. I think that there is a great novel within this messy first draft.
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Mar 18, 2016 Jennifer rated it it was amazing

I often ask myself the sorts of questions that this book raises: Can some traumas simply never be healed, no matter how much salve loved ones offer? What do friendship and relationship mean when significant swathes of a person's history remain secret, withheld? When, if ever, do descriptions of brutality and violence inflict more harm than good on readers? I appreciate that this book made me ask those questions again and again, in slow and sustained ways, and that it gave me one more entrance in I often ask myself the sorts of questions that this book raises: Can some traumas simply never be healed, no matter how much salve loved ones offer? What do friendship and relationship mean when significant swathes of a person's history remain secret, withheld? When, if ever, do descriptions of brutality and violence inflict more harm than good on readers? I appreciate that this book made me ask those questions again and again, in slow and sustained ways, and that it gave me one more entrance into those questions with people in my life.

There were plenty of things about the novel that raised my eyebrows, and people have documented most of those concerns in better ways than I can, but one that I can't pass over is how few women populate this book. Sure, there are some who pop up from time to time, mostly as wives of more central characters, but I suspect that A Little Life wouldn't pass the literary equivalent of the Bechdel test. The world that Yanagihara has created is a man's man's man's world, that's for sure. I'm not taking umbrage at this--I actually appreciated reading a book so focused on the various intimacies among men--but it did make me wonder whether this story could be written with an overwhelmingly female cast of characters. Would people read it? Celebrate it? Would we interpret the vast abuse that Jude suffers and survives differently? What about the enabling, the caring, the acts of those who love Jude?

In any case, what I found most fascinating about the book wasn't the story at all, wasn't the characters, wasn't the trauma or the friendship. It was, rather, the prose, the structure, the stylistic choices. Yanagihara includes long passages that use no names, referring to all those male characters only as "he" and leaving it to the reader to decipher who's who. There are also many places where shifts in time aren't signaled very clearly, again leaving the reader to figure out, in this case, when's when. I found both of those choices frustrating at first, and if the story weren't so compelling, I might have given up. But what I loved was that the book ended up teaching me how to read it, to accept more and more frequently my uncertainty about character and setting. It made me work for an understanding of even these basic aspects of story, and so upended my assumptions about what is in fact basic and necessary to storytelling. ...more

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Sep 18, 2018 Emmett Racecar rated it it was amazing

Shelves: favourites, fiction, audiobooks

Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

I have never before threw a book across the room but I have never had a book cause me such anger. I was angry at both the fictional characters and at the author for making them go through such unrelenting trauma. It was brilliant and raw and one of the best books I have read in my life and the only book I have read as an adult that has made me cry. After finishing the book, I googled a few interviews with Hanya Yanagihara where she talks about how she based the atm ...more

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Dec 11, 2015 cat rated it it was amazing

Shelves: read-in-2015

I don't remember the last time I wept while reading a book. Not a few tears, but great wrenching sobs that were brought on just as often by the moments of pure love and tenderness portrayed, as they were by the depictions of horrific physical and sexual trauma that the main character endures. This book was heartbreaking, brutal in it's pain, and one of the most resonant depictions of the ways that trauma impacts all parts of our lives that I have read. As the New Yorker review says, "The graphic I don't remember the last time I wept while reading a book. Not a few tears, but great wrenching sobs that were brought on just as often by the moments of pure love and tenderness portrayed, as they were by the depictions of horrific physical and sexual trauma that the main character endures. This book was heartbreaking, brutal in it's pain, and one of the most resonant depictions of the ways that trauma impacts all parts of our lives that I have read. As the New Yorker review says, "The graphic depictions of abuse and physical suffering that one finds in “A Little Life” are rare in mainstream literary fiction....Yanagihara’s rendering of Jude’s abuse never feels excessive or sensationalist. It is not included for shock value or titillation, as is sometimes the case in works of horror or crime fiction. Jude’s suffering is so extensively documented because it is the foundation of his character." And as someone that has worked with survivors of sexual violence for 20 years now, the ways that Yanagihara centers the abuse and all of it's effects, left me reeling with recognition. I so appreciated that the desire to have some sort of cathartic wrap up where our main character finds his way through the impact of trauma unscathed is understood as impossible. And that is where the strength of this novel lies for me - in the brief moments of joy, tenderness, and love that slip in between the cracks of an absolutely broken life, a life that is defined by the abuse and trauma suffered in formative years, trauma that is inescapable, defining, and forces us to struggle internally with what resilience looks like in such a brutal situation. As Yanagihara herself said in an interview (appropriately titled 'A Stubborn Lack of Redemption') "One of the things I wanted to do with this book is create a character who never gets better. And, relatedly, to explore this idea that there is a level of trauma from which a person simply can’t recover. I do believe that really, we can sustain only a finite amount of suffering. That amount varies from person to person and is different, sometimes wildly so, in nature; what might destroy one person may not another. So much of this book is about Jude’s hopefulness, his attempt to heal himself, and I hope that the narrative’s momentum and suspense comes from the reader’s growing recognition — and Jude’s — that he’s too damaged to ever truly be repaired, and that there’s a single inevitable ending for him."

This was a hard book to read. And a beautiful book to read. And a book that has it's flaws - slightly too long (a small amount of more radical editing at the beginning of the book would have really helped), slightly unbelievable in it's remove from any cultural context of time (the author gives you NO idea when this book is taking place, by removing all cultural references in a city like New York), and slightly over-wrought at points (especially in it's depictions of self-injury). Overall, though, the author drew me in slowly and like boiling a frog in hot water, only turned the heat up in increments, revealing the scope and nature of the abuse over time, which both stunned me and surprised me not at all. The redemption that does come in this book is through those small moments of love, tenderness, and kindness that she inserts just as strongly as the abuse, through the friendships and deep love portrayed in the second half of the main character's life.

I embarked on this novel without knowing the arc of the storyline. The sexual and physical violence were a surprise to me, and I considered setting this book aside, having long ago sworn off books that sensationalize sexual violence as a self-protective measure, but I will leave you with a quote from the author that resonated so much for me, "As regards sexual violence, well, were we to avoid that topic, it’d mean avoiding not only much of art, but also history itself: it’d mean avoiding the world. Much as I hope the reader is there in this book to bear witness to Jude’s life and his suffering, we equally owe it as humans to witness other humans’ suffering as well, and not turn away because it makes us uncomfortable." And you will be uncomfortable if you read this book. But you will also be filled with elemental beauty. And that, my friends, is what made this one a 5 star read for me. I felt a bit like the scar tissue on Jude's back by the end, raw and painful, yet covered in newly growing skin. ...more

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Oct 28, 2015 Chaundra rated it really liked it

Shelves: modern-fiction, nyc

This book really has no right to be this good - it's bleak and tragic but in a sort of desperate foolishness. And yet it's also crafted so carefully and with real tenderness. If anything could be described as word painting it's this novel. I just wish the subject matter felt less self-indulgently contrived. ...more

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