wrapped-up-in-books - Tumblr blog

wrapped-up-in-books · 8 years ago

Photo

“A Little Life” by Hanya Yanagihara--A Book Review

⭐️⭐️ out of 5

Much can be said about this book, when it came out there was so much buzz around it. Originally, I was hesitant on picking it up because it seemed to have some passing resemblance to the book I’m writing and I wanted to make sure that it was nothing like it. Well, I was right. I read a pretty spoiler-y review that reassured me that it was absolutely nothing but a bare bones resemblance. Still, I read the book.

To start this, I should say that this is the kind of book that you either love or hate... I thought it was meh, at first, but I ended up hating it.

The book is divided into 7 parts, each one telling part of the lives of four friends: JB, Jude, Malcolm, and Willem.

PLOT:

The book is mostly light on plot. It is a character study on the four friends and their bonds as they get into and out of each other’s life. The true mystery of the book is Jude, who seems to be the most noble out of all of them, but also the most distant. His childhood is a mystery which not even his friends know much about. The plot is mostly character-driven, with the readers finding out about Jude’s past.

I like character driven plots, my favourite books are between Les Misérables, The Bell Jar, and The Catcher of the Rye. But this book was way too long at times to be a satisfactory character driven-plot.

Take Les Miserables, for example, it is a huge book, with a lot of plot and story and lots and lots of characters. Still, the brick manages to throw in a lot of character development and even infamously several essays about topic and themes that were contemporary for 19th century France and now allow us to have some clearer context on the characters’ actions and ways of thinking.

Here, one of the things I’m on the fence about, is how very little context the book give us. Yanagihara gives us a little glimpse on Malcolm, Willem, and JB’s life and then she jumps straight into Jude’s. Also, there is little to none historical context, because, I wager, technology is changing so fast doing other than texting or sending mails would horribly date the book in a year or two.

CHARACTERS:

As I said, the book makes no pretenses about having a plot. It’s not there, at all. Characters are all Yanagihara cares about. And usually I share that concern, but I couldn’t care for hers. Wait, no. I couldn’t care for Jude.

So, I’m gonna go into each individual character, since even though this is a very long book, it doesn’t have that many important characters. That’s one complain I have, the book is long and it makes the effort to show that the main four have many other friendships, but they never appear except for one scene and the many attributes Yanagihara puts to her background characters make them appear mostly like a colourful wallpaper rather than something that help the narrative in some other way.

First I’ll start with Malcolm because he is always forgotten by his own creator, so I think he should get the first place for once. Malcolm get the last end of the stick. His point of view appears in the last end of one of the parts, and then he is relegated as a background character, which is a shame because I wanted to see what was his resolution. He’s the rich kid of the group, biracial, and always the second best to his sister. Also, he doesn’t know what is his sexuality. Only the last one is resolved, him being the only one who marries. His story is so incomplete. He’s just there (along with so many of the other characters) to make Jude look like a saint.

JB. Oh, god. Is it bad that I saw myself the most on him? He’s the arrogant artist of the group. He knows that he’s brilliant and he just throws himself and his friends into his art. In fact, a lot of his art is about his friends, which…okay. I get that the main theme of this book is friendship, but were his friends really that interesting? Doesn’t he like anything else?

Willem is the angel of the group. He has no flaws. No wait, he does. He is too forgiving when it comes to Jude, because Jude reminds him of his dead brother. Also he falls in love with Jude and the story takes a creepy turn. He works a lot in movies, and ends up being the most famous of all of them. I’ll admit that as someone who’s interested in cinema, his movies do have interesting concepts, but are a little bit too out there.

Jude. So, here’s the thing, this book is not really about any of the friends other than Jude. In fact, only the first section of the book features Malcolm and JB, from the second section on the book is mostly about Jude and his friendship with Willem. I was fine with it at first, since I thought that we would go back to them, but we only did in parts to highlight Jude or completely forgot about them. Even Willem, who is the second most important character, was secondary to Jude. No, not secondary, more like an afterthought.

I know that it is an odd thing to complain, mostly because that is standard when writing a book, focusing mostly on the protagonist, especially in character driven books like this one, but I’ll admit that I felt cheated. I had bought this book thinking it was an ensemble piece and the first part does make you think that by giving all the other three characters’ flaws and problems and things they must resolve for it never to be touched on again.

But even then, I don’t want to say that Jude is perfect or a Gary Stu, because he has very clear flaws, but he is such a woobie that at a certain moment I just didn’t care for his character. But this brings me to…

THEMES:

As I said, the main theme of this book is clearly friendship. Particularly the friendship that blossoms between male friends per the author, which isn’t common for people to explore. The friendship aspect was really light, considering that this was supposed to be the book’s main theme. There are only a handful of passages that I can think about regarding these guys’ friendship. They are together a lot, and I guess that part of what the author tried to do was emphasise how people with different interests can be friends, but there were very few moments in which pure, distilled friendship was exhibited. Most of the book was written as a something that was told, rather than shown. We heard about their college days, we heard about stories, we heard about their love for each other, but we only saw the drama, the angst. And yes, drama and angst and sadness are parts of friendship, not everything is laughter, some of it is long silence broken infrequently and longing, but I didn’t really get that either. It was just drama that broke them apart and even avoidance of the other party.

The second theme, the one that is actually the most prominent part of the book, I’d say, is the ability to keep suffering. This is basically Jude’s story. His past, though tragic, I could totally see happening. I can totally see the system failing him and him suffering the way he did…for the most part. I’ll just say that the first glimpses we get at what happened to him I had to put the book down, and his adult life is almost like a fairy tale, complete with a prince to save him and a wolf out to get him.

But everything, everyone acts in such an irrational way just to keep his suffering going. Things happen to him, which, guess what, they’re not accidents! And people do nothing because he did them to himself. Yes, that’s right. This man keeps hurting himself and people do nothing except cure him for him to do horrible things to himself over and over again. Everyone knows and nobody does anything.

He even gets an abusive boyfriend and nobody tells his best friend because he asks them to. I call bull.

Another theme, one that was explored with Jude’s adoptive family is exactly that of the families that you choose. Which brings me to say that my favourite sections weren’t even Jude’s, they were Harold’s. He was my favourite character in the whole book. His story, from start to finish was the most heart-breaking one. It wasn’t really substantial to Jude’s but it made everything, every interaction Harold has with Jude and Willem so rich. This is one of those characters that I can see being real people.

Paedophilia. That was a thing. So this is a warning, it is not explicit, but it’s definitely there.

PROS:

The prose can be beautiful. Just as beautiful as my puns. No, but really, this book isn’t quotable, nothing stood out to me like that, but there were certain passages that left me thinking for days. As I said, at times, I did have to put down the book several times because it was just so difficult.

CONS:

The book is way too long. I really don’t think that Yanagihara needed 800-odd pages for this book. As I said, the story becomes a woobie-fication of a character and lost my sympathy towards him.

This is not my last problem with this book, more like something that I couldn’t help but to notice on another book that I really liked and it brought it down, and I felt that it was similar here: the lack of female characters. The other book is The Secret History by Donna Tartt. It amazed me to find out that both books were written by women and their female characters were the least developed of all of them. Yes, Tartt has Camilla, but she takes a backseat to everything that Richard and Henry do and is more of a love interest. Here, Yanagihara only has a few female characters, Julia who’s Jude’s (and Willem’s, kinda, it’s mentioned but never shown) adoptive mum but only plays the role of the mum and wife. She never has any real interaction like Harold has with any of the boys. Hell, even Willem’s girlfriends are disposable.

#hanya yanigahara #a little life #book review #books #booklr #bookworm #book #review #2 ⭐️#english #2017

0 notes