Buyer beware...

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.