It seems quite ironic for a book of seven hundred and twenty pages to be titled ‘A Little Life’, but American writer Hanya Yanagihara achieves the unthinkable: she makes the reader want to take in every word and every beautifully crafted sentence with patience and dedication to the very end, and beyond.
Los Angeles
born Yanagihara is of mixed descent. Her father is from Hawaii, but with
Japanese roots, and her mother was born in Seoul.
Her background
and her early life spent in Hawaii come through in the rich tapestry she
creates in ‘A Little Life’, which was shortlisted for the 2015 Man
Booker Prize and won the 2015 Kirkus Prize for fiction.
In this book
the author conjures up a story, the tale of four friends – Jude, a lawyer, an
orphan of ambiguous ethnicity with a difficult past and complex health issues;
Malcolm, an architect from a wealthy bi-racial family; JB, a painter of Haitian
descent and Willem, also an orphan, an aspiring actor and the closest one to
Jude. The story slowly develops into a very credible tale and ultimately
becomes an all-encompassing world, where the reader feels they also belong.
This world is intricate, hyperreal, hypnotic. It visits places and themes that
are painful and traumatic with unflinching intent. The reader has no choice but
to follow the pages, to go on this most uncomfortable of journeys until its
shattering end. The only consolation is a style of writing so consistently
exceptional, as to make the reading experience harrowing and magnificent at once.
The novel is,
amongst many other things, a meditation on friendship: “…the only trick of
friendship, I think, is to find people who are better than you are – not smarter,
not cooler, but kinder, and more generous, and more forgiving – and then to
appreciate them for what they can teach you, and try to listen to them when they
tell you something about yourself, no matter how bad – or good – it might be,
and to trust them, which is the hardest thing of all. But the best, as well.”
“I know
my life’s meaningful because…because I’m a good friend. I love my friends, and
I care about them, and I think I make them happy.”
Yanagihara’s
masterful work proves that neither money nor success can truly rescue us from
tragedy. “…and he feels his breath abandon him; it feels as if his heart is
made of something oozing and cold, like ground meat, and it is being squeezed
inside a fist so that chunks of it are falling, plopping to the ground near his
feet.”
At the end
we’re left pondering two crucial questions: what does the title ‘A Little Life’
really mean? 'Does "X" always equal "X"?'
#alittlelife #hanyayanagihara #shortlistedbookerprize2015
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