A Little Life in Queereaders

Jul 17, 2015 Dov Zeller rated it liked it

Shelves: illness, queer-lgbt, novel, existential-pain-and-angst, physical-and-or-emotional-abuse, fiction-21st-cen, trauma, psychology-and-therapy, not-finished

I didn't make it through this book. There are a lot of rave reviews, but I found it pretty frustrating and implausible. Not implausible in the sense that "that doesn't happen in real life." But I wasn't buying it within the world of this particular text.

There were some great moments, too. A lot of wisdom in here about silence (the failure or inability to share intimate details of our lives) and how it can build and becomes a large object that is harder and harder to get out from under. (It gets ...more

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Aug 02, 2015 Megan rated it really liked it

Shelves: illness-narratives, mental-illness, queer, disability

I am waffling between 3 and 4 stars, but in the interest of being charitable, going for 4. I was really gripped by these characters.

Here is what I loved about this novel, and these are big things:
--Its detailed attention to Jude's illnesses and disability, and his relationship to acquired disability.
--Similarly, the novel's portrayal of the problem of loving someone who is sick and practices self-harm.
--That Jude and Willem develop a relationship that is asexual and yet legible as romantic/a bi ...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.
...more

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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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Apr 05, 2023 April rated it did not like it

Hate, hate, HATED this book. Trauma porn at its worst. And don't even get me started on the depiction of enabling behaviors as the highest form of friendship and love.

TRIGGER WARNING: Anyone who actually has a history of abuse should stay as far away from this novel as possible. Trust me, the well-meaning friends who recommended it to you don't have a clue about how traumatic experiences feel, either when they're happening or during the process of recovery.

Yanagihara has been quoted as saying ...more

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Aug 15, 2018 Scott rated it really liked it · review of another edition

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

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Aug 02, 2018 Nikki Morse rated it really liked it

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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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