The People in the Trees by Hanya Yanagihara
So this book had been sitting on my TBR shelves for a couple of years now, having had rave reviews, and I was in the mood for something a bit more literary. Unfortunately I really disliked it, in the same way that I disliked Lolita and Orhan Pamuk's The Museum of Innocence. It's a narrative about something horrible, by the person who is doing the horrible thing, and they are completely self-justificatory about it. In Lolita the justification is "love", in this book it's "science" but there's this willed blindness to the moral implications of what the narrators are doing.
I hope I wasn't implying that there's no sexual abuse in this book. It's not a spoiler, the first line is a headline "Renowned Scientist Faces Charges of Sexual Abuse". It's just the cherry on top of the cake, which is mainly about how westerners have raped and polluted the earth in the name of progress and science and profit.
Oh, and it's long. It has "only" 362 pages of narative, but the print is very small.
The other reason why I picked it up is that it's set on a remote tropical island, and having spent some of my childhood on a tropical island I thought it would be interesting to revisit. But the narrator hates the place. He hates its steaming jungles, its primitive inhabitants, his colleagues. Nothing impresses him or causes him wonder, although he narrates things that are strange and wonderful.
Anyway, I just wanted to get that off my chest. It's clearly a very accomplished novel, but I really didn't enjoy reading it.
I hope I wasn't implying that there's no sexual abuse in this book. It's not a spoiler, the first line is a headline "Renowned Scientist Faces Charges of Sexual Abuse". It's just the cherry on top of the cake, which is mainly about how westerners have raped and polluted the earth in the name of progress and science and profit.
Oh, and it's long. It has "only" 362 pages of narative, but the print is very small.
The other reason why I picked it up is that it's set on a remote tropical island, and having spent some of my childhood on a tropical island I thought it would be interesting to revisit. But the narrator hates the place. He hates its steaming jungles, its primitive inhabitants, his colleagues. Nothing impresses him or causes him wonder, although he narrates things that are strange and wonderful.
Anyway, I just wanted to get that off my chest. It's clearly a very accomplished novel, but I really didn't enjoy reading it.