When you’re a reader you’re essentially a loner, I’ve always
escaped into a world of my own where I’m immersed in the plot, rhythm,
characters, storyline and the volatile emotions I flirt with incessantly.
There are however books that asphyxiate and you seek
desperately to surface from the terrible emotion that grips until you feel the
desperate need to bob up from the mire and breathe unadulterated air, fill your
lungs with pure oxygen and shrug violently the devil seated on your chest. If you’re
lucky. To happen upon a book like that.
Hanya Yanagihara’s, ‘A Little Life’ is like a fist around
your heart, gripping insidiously at first and then its iron clad grasp chokes
you and the lump in your throat moves to a vice around your brain till you’re
sure you will explode.
When I read the reviews of this book I was amused to read
that someone suggested a support group for the readers of this book. I now
wish there was.
While I’m trying to resurface let me tell you why I love
this book. It’s about friendships and love. It’s central theme is dark and
filled with such terrible pain yet the treatment of this isn’t preachy or judgmental.
This is a voluminous book, 718 pages of
which over 200 hundred you will read with clenched fists and helpless
despoliation. Morbid really, you want it to end… moth to a flame yet you’re
entrapped, unable to stop. Sadism at it’s best. Not the book. Your treatment of
it.
This is when you fling the book and go do something mundane,
futile, stodgy. Only because your sense of self preservation finally kicks in. When
you reach the final page and you know you’re reading the last sentence there is
a sense of relief. Finally you are set free. So you think.
The joy of the book is many. It’s set in Manhattan and I could
identify almost every avenue and street. The story is about four friends who
met as students and their struggles through the years, their relationships with
others, with each other and their careers. It struggles with the anxieties of
our lives and leads you to a better understanding of human nature especially of
mental illness and foibles which we as an ambitious progressive culture fail to
comprehend. Against your will you are forced to forgive Jude St. Francis’s
decrepitude, waffle between wanting to whack him on the head and hide him in
your arms.
Finally what gets me is the lack of recriminations and labelling
when there could have been another 200 pages alone on this. My takeaways are
too many to mention, let me just say my soul is wrung out of me and I will
carry this book for weeks to come and if fortuitous, recover. Don’t want to
though. It’s gift abundant.
Read it, Caveat emptor.
