A little life and a lot of suffering
I have finished reading the highly acclaimed Hanya Yanagihara's "A little life". The book is highly praised and it does deserve the praise. It is well written, the style is nice. It touches upon may a difficult subject, starting from child-abuse and ranging to self-mutilation, angst, hatred, hidden and yet damaging emotions, etc.
I liked, I enjoyed the virtually life-long friendship of a group of young men described in the book. This friendship is almost without any blemishes, despite their differences all four friends manage to respect each other. They do have their arguments and sometimes very serious ones, but nonetheless they are united by their friendship.
Yanagihara did a great job describing the complex machineries of the soul of some of the main characters.
There are drawback too. The book is TOO long. Yanagihara COULD have fitted the same story, with the same powerful impact in a much smaller book. Sometimes I had a feeling she was testing me as a reader - will he continue reading? Challenging me, in the way Jude (a trouble character of the book) tested patience and feelings of his friends and close ones.
I have some difficulty believing the central character, apart from being severely abused and psychologically traumatized he is almost a genius in everything. Litigation, piano, singing, perfect memory, great mind a great mathematician too. Maybe hte idea was to show, that in an abused child even all these talents will go to waste and will not be appreciated by the child himself?
It also hard to understand WHY do Jude's friends love SO MUCH. if you haven't read the book - take my word, he is not your ideal friend. Far from it.
By the way, coincidentally all of his friends turn out to be hugely successful in their fields. We all know many people, and usually their fates are all different. Here, all good characters are really, really good and all very successful. The bad characters, are BAD. In this regard, the world Yanagihara gives us is too flat, too simple.
I also had difficulty believing certain plot turns, like, how for example, judging by the book, there are pedophiles willng to pay for sex with an underaged boy in so VERY MANY small American cities! I do hope this is very far from being true!
It is a powerful book. There is no doubt of that. It does make one think of one's internal demons, fears and of how vulnerable we all are. How everyone is a mystery, possibly hiding a very troubled person under the guise of a upstanding memeber of society. But were it less straightforward, a bit shorter and with more depth of characters it would have been much better.
Oftentimes, especially as I was nearing the end of this book, I felt I am the one being tested here. Will I, as the reader have teh endurance to finish the book?!