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A Little Life

Hanya Yanagihara

Start date: January 1, 2025

Finish date: January 31, 2025

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Jul 15, 2019 Kitty Marie rated it it was amazing

Shelves: books-finished, favorite-books, 2019-books

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. Warning, this review will contain some spoilers for a film called Lilya 4-Ever. And gigantic spoilers for the entirety of A Little Life.

There is this film called Lilya 4-Ever. It's deeply moving, effective, just the most haunting film I've ever seen. While not for the faint of heart, I think anyone who would watch the whole thing would come out with more humanity and empathy afterwards. It's based off of the true story of a young girl named Danguolė Rasalaitė. What's interesting is that the the Warning, this review will contain some spoilers for a film called Lilya 4-Ever. And gigantic spoilers for the entirety of A Little Life.

There is this film called Lilya 4-Ever. It's deeply moving, effective, just the most haunting film I've ever seen. While not for the faint of heart, I think anyone who would watch the whole thing would come out with more humanity and empathy afterwards. It's based off of the true story of a young girl named Danguolė Rasalaitė. What's interesting is that the the girl's real life story was a bit trimmed in the film, removing some terrible coincidences in her life that were almost too horrible to be true (yet, they were.) I bring this up because in many ways I think of A Little Life as being like an exhaustingly long literary novel version of Lilya 4-Ever, without the trimmings, and it's main character's back story is so like Danguolė's.

But ultimately Jude is like a combination of all the haunting accounts I've ever heard about CSA and human trafficking. The rampant self harm and low life expectancy in Southeast Asian child brothels, Steven Stayner's struggles after being rescued, the layers and layers of failures of the state to care for Cyntoia Brown, the list goes on. Reading through Jude's struggles is like remembering all of that and feeling outrage anew. Amalgamating so many misfortunes into one character might come off as dramatized, but something about Jude himself or the telling of his story was grippingly effective.

I felt pretty much every emotion while reading this. Sadness, anger, happiness, fear. For example, when he had a nightmare about Harold assaulting him, I almost dropped the book in surprise. In his happiest moments with Willem I was aww'ing up a storm. Always liked Willem but didn't realize until the end of the story how instrumental of a character he was, and how his feelings about Jude can influence a reader's feelings.

There was this moment toward the last quarter of the novel where I was completely expecting this was the moment Jude would die and was getting choked up- then a few pages later, it was Willem who died. I spent the remainder of the book in a kind of hazy shock, to the point of being weirdly detached from Jude's eventual death.

Even though Jude is the main character, Willem is in many ways the one that is easy to relate to, the one that feels for Jude and wants to help him. When he died it was like those high emotions grinded to a halt, to a sort of sluggish numbness. I did adore Jude though, and Willam, and Harold!!! and even the tumultuous JB who I think was shortchanged by the plot. Five stars for making me feel for the characters and be willing to fight through the grimmest atmosphere ever to connect with them.

Now some criticisms- I do think the book seems under-researched in a way that can be irksome. All of the characters are queer but Willem and Jude, much as I love them, are kind of conveniently just in love with each other and don't really elaborate on their sexualities. JB is the one gay character and we learn little to nothing of his relationships. He's a great character and seemed to have hidden, unexplored (and torturously unresolved!) feelings for the two leads. Then there is Malcolm whose side plot is all but carelessly thrown in the trash, the story so revolving around Jude and Willem.

But the main issue is just how horribly tragic everything ended up being- for everyone. In 2019 and onward I hope authors will think carefully before adding yet another Gay Couple Dies Tragically plot on the jenga tower of modern depictions of gay couples in media.

Another thing to take issue with is the way mental health is perceived by the characters. I've heard this book is not intended to have a set time and place but the cluelessness about mental health seems straight out of the 50s. There were so many parts in which I wanted to scream at Andy in particular, he is one of the weaker and less believable figures in the narrative.

That said, I did appreciate that there was no easy out in the storyline, reason being that there are some heavy films/books I've read before where the main character suffers from this or that. They go through a lot, then talk about their feelings and they (and us) are enlightened and everything's right again, or at least righted enough so that the author can give their story an easy and preachy resolution.

I get the sense with A Little Life that the author didn't have answers on what would "fix" Jude and that's okay. It's better that some easy answer wasn't forcibly cobbled together in the end. But Jude broadening his interests and horizons, and spending time getting to know a wider circle of people (especially people he could relate to, people he could help who share his suffering) could have been good. I really thought his career wasn't helping him on a personal level, it seemed like just an outlet for regaining some control over his life but not conducive to finding meaning and purpose.

Final add-on note- while I'm not very knowledgable on the topic of self harm, I thought this book did a great job parsing out why Jude does it and has such difficulty stopping. There is so much ignorance and lack of sympathy surrounding that topic, so seeing it elucidated here in this emotionally charged novel was good. ...more

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