a little life, a book review

End of the month.
One heartbreak after another.
A Little Life, here it is.
My very first book review.

Title: Ett Litet Liv (A Little Life)
Author: Hanya Yanagihara
Published: 2015
Pages: 732 (Swedish version)
Translation: Yes, by Niclas Nilsson
Rating: 4,5 out of 5 hangovers
LIST OF TRIGGER WARNINGS: https://www.booktriggerwarnings.com/A_Little_Life_by_Hanya_Yanagihara

We’re starting off with a heavy one, A Little Life. Trust me, I’m aware that I’m quite late with this book. I had heard so many things about A Little Life, so much so that I thought that it came out in the recent months and decided to give it a go but when I tell you that I was not ready. Oh, I was not ready. And seven years late to the game. It’s a novel about four men who met at and went to university together in Massachusetts. They endured and lived a ”struggle-life” as young adults and continued being friends as adults having now moved to New York and found professional success in their respective fields at a more mature age up ‘til their 50s and 60s.

Characters

Malcolm Irvine, the biracial (African American and Caucasian) architect.
Jean-Baptiste (JB) Marion, the African American (Haitian) artist.
Willem Ragnarsson, the Swedish-Icelandic actor.
Jude St. Francis, the racially ambiguous lawyer.
We follow them as they navigate through life with plenty of highs and, unfortunately, plenty of lows. Their stories are filled with sadness and heartbreaks, love and happiness, sex and abuse, poverty and wealth, chaos and ego, trauma and addiction, friendships and enemies, life, and death. Just to name a few.

Jude is the protagonist, the main character. This story is mainly about him and from his point of view. We get to know the rest of the characters as well, some more than others but the focus is mostly on Jude. I would say that he takes up 60% of the book, Willem 15%, JB 10% and Malcolm 5%. The remaining 10% is scattered and shared with the other characters that show up throughout this novel. It may not sound as much but they’re all equally important to the story and certainly take up space, however evil or good they might be.

We get to know them separately and as a group in the first 50-100 pages, even find ourselves falling in love with them and rooting for them in most, if not all, of their endeavors and then boom. Heartbreak after heartbreak as we dig deeper into each character’s personal lives and stories. Their perfections and flaws with every turning page.

There are seven chapters named (in order): Lispenard Street, Postman, Vanities, Axiom of equality, Happy years, Dear comrade and Lispenard Street. In my reading experience with this book, I found that Axiom of equality and Happy years broke my heart the most. An honorable mention would be Dear comrade. But in all honesty, it’s quite hard to pick just one when the whole book is a heartbreak in itself.

Some have described A Little Life as torture-porn due to all its explicit and heavily detailed content but also because of the ending, which I think is quite unfair. The book is called A little life and is literally about, a little life. Whether its happy and sad, good and bad, more or less, it’s just a little life and it’s complex, unfair and heartbreaking just as much as it’s beautiful, passionate and loving.

Rating

I give this book 4,5 out of 5 hangovers.
Some people give out stars, I give out hangovers.
And yes, I will be doing that from now on.
The higher the hangover-rate, the longer it took for me to recover from said novel due to how fucking amazing it was.
From what I’ve heard about this particular book, I was expecting much more explicit, horrifying and detailed writing and content. But don’t get me wrong, a lot of things in this book got me shook, shooketh and whatever words young adults use these days. It just wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be which, in a way, I’m happy about.
The reason why I’m not giving it a full 5 out of 5 hangovers is because of the number of pages this book has. 732 to be exact in the Swedish version. I feel that it could’ve easily been 450-500 pages but at the same time am I very grateful for every word used and written because no word was wasted.

This book will piss you right off in every way possible. Frustrate you beyond belief. It will serve you a glimmer of hope and snatch it away from you in a matter of milliseconds, like someone unexpectedly pulling the rug from under you. It will make you hate the people working in the professions mentioned in the book. One in particular. Make you lose faith in humanity but also restore it. You will believe in love and at the same time make you hate everything that has to do with it. It even may make you feel the need to call your friends and family to check up on them and let them know that you love them. You will appreciate life and its every little aspect. I dare even say that you’ll learn to be more grateful.

Would I reccommend this book?

Yes and no. I want everybody to read it but only if you mentally prepare yourself by reading the list of trigger warnings. It is a must. A fair warning is that the list may contain spoilers, but it is well worth it because oh my, the story can get heavy at times. Even the trigger-list is quite intense.

NOTE: There isn’t any form of time stamp, no mention of historical events, cultural impacts, or even technological progress to talk about how many years have passed etc. There’s only mentioning of birthdays or personal anniversaries to let the reader know that some time has passed instead of the use of dates, weeks, months, and years. For example, for a book that’s so heavily rooted in and niched about New York, there’s no acknowledgment, reference or comment at all about 9/11.

But despite all of that, I was genuinely sad to say goodbye to the characters, especially the four main ones. It was nice to get to know them and accompany them on their journey through this thing called life. It was a tragic, beautiful and enlightening read and I’m already thinking about re-reading it.

Favourite quote

”Lately, he had been wondering if codependence was such a bad thing. He took pleasure in his friendships, and it didn’t hurt anyone, so who cared if it was codependent or not? And anyway, how was a friendship any more codependent than a relationship? Why was it admirable when you were twenty-seven but creepy when you were thirty-seven?
Why wasn’t friendship as good as a relationship? Why wasn’t it even better? It was two people who remained together, day after day, bound not by sex or physical attraction or money or children or property, but only by the shared agreement to keep going, the mutual dedication to a union that could never be codified. Friendship was witnessing another’s slow drip of miseries, and long bouts of boredom, and occasional triumphs. It was feeling honored by the privilege of getting to be present for another person’s most dismal moments and knowing that you could be dismal around him in return.”

Favourite page? The last page
(spoiler warning)

“It is then that I talk to you the most, that I go downstairs late at night and stand before
,which now hangs above our dining-room table: “Willem,” I ask you, “do you feel like I do? Do you think he was happy with me?” Because he deserved happiness. We aren’t guaranteed it, none of us are, but he deserved it. But you only smile, not at me but just past me, and you never have an answer. It is also then that I wish I believed in some sort of life after life, that in another universe, maybe on a small red planet where we have not legs but tails, where we paddle through the atmosphere like seals, where the air itself is sustenance, composed of trillions of molecules of protein and sugar and all one has to do is open one’s mouth and inhale in order to remain alive and healthy, maybe you two are there together, floating through the climate.
Or maybe he is closer still: maybe he is that gray cat that has begun to sit outside our neighbor’s house, purring when I reach out my hand to it; maybe he is that new puppy I see tugging at the end of my other neighbor’s leash; maybe he is that toddler I saw running through the square a few months ago, shrieking with joy, his parents huffing after him; maybe he is that flower that suddenly bloomed on the rhododendron bush I thought had died long ago; maybe he is that cloud, that wave, that rain, that mist.
It isn’t only that he died, or how he died; it is what he died believing. And so I try to be kind to everything I see, and in everything I see, I see him. But back then, back on Lispenard Street, I didn’t know so much of this. Then, we were only standing and looking up at that red-brick building, and I was pretending that I never had to fear for him, and he was letting me pretend this: that all the dangerous things he could have done, all the ways he could have broken my heart, were in the past, the stuff of stories, that the time that lay behind us was scary, but the time that lay ahead of us was not.
”You jumped off the roof?” I repeated. “Why on earth would you have done such a thing?” “It’s a good story,” he said. He even grinned at me. “I’ll tell you.” “Please,” I said. And then he did.”