A Little Life

by Hanya Yanagihara

English language

Published July 8, 2015

ISBN:: 978-1-4472-9481-8

(70 reviews)

When four classmates from a small Massachusetts college move to New York to make their way, they’re broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition. There is kind, handsome Willem, an aspiring actor; JB, a quick-witted, sometimes cruel Brooklyn-born painter seeking entry to the art world; Malcolm, a frustrated architect at a prominent firm; and withdrawn, brilliant, enigmatic Jude, who serves as their center of gravity. Over the decades, their relationships deepen and darken, tinged by addiction, success, and pride. Yet their greatest challenge, each comes to realize, is Jude himself, by midlife a terrifyingly talented litigator yet an increasingly broken man, his mind and body scarred by an unspeakable childhood, and haunted by what he fears is a degree of trauma that he’ll not only be unable to overcome—but that will define his life forever.

In rich and resplendent prose, Yanagihara has fashioned a tragic and transcendent …

In rich and resplendent prose, Yanagihara has fashioned a tragic and transcendent hymn to brotherly love, a masterful depiction of heartbreak, and a dark examination of the tyranny of memory and the limits of human endurance.

([Source][1])

[1]: www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/239717/a-little-life-by-hanya-yanagihara/

26 editions

Ascapola reviewed A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara

Review of 'A Little Life' on 'Goodreads'

2 stars

I grew increasingly impatient and unsympathetic, I'm afraid. Not with Jude; but with the repeated re-visitation of Jude's woes in the narration. I guess this was a device - no doubt Jude's nightmarish life would be like that.

Yanagihara describes Jude's world in great detail and yet the other characters - including Willem remain more-or-less cyphers.

The London Times says, "Yanagihara takes you so deeply into the lives and minds of these characters that you struggle to leave them behind". Not me, I'm out of here.

flarion reviewed A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara

Review of 'A Little Life' on 'Storygraph'

5 stars

What a ride!

Kattas reviewed A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara

Review of 'A Little Life' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

This book was a beast to get through, and unlike other books that have taken me a time to read, it was not because of pointless passages or delirious developments in the narrative, but rather the intensity of the pathos the book evokes. Yanagihara makes you care about the characters, and then brings them from the depths of suffering to peaks of elation, only to drive them off the far side and back into the abyss - again and again. It is a monumental read - the word Tolstoian seems apt - and well worth it. The moments of illumination and epiphany are worth it all.

Marcus Low reviewed A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara

Review of 'A Little Life' on 'GoodReads'

1 star

frustrating and disappointing. See the NYRB review for reasoning.

Michael @ Knowledge Lost reviewed A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara

Review of 'A Little Life' on 'Goodreads'

2 stars

A Little Life is a novel about the lifelong friendship of four classmates from a Massachusetts liberal arts college. After college, Willem (an actor), JB (an artist), Malcolm (an architect) and Jude (a lawyer) move to New York to begin their lives. The novel begins by following the friends through their lives and careers and the shifting dynamics of the group. However, Jude becomes the primary focus as we learn about his horrifying backstory.

I am of two minds with this novel; first of all, there are some very important issues explored within A Little Life. I am sure many people have been told about the high amount of trigger warnings that come with this book, dealing with depression, abuse, self-mutilation and so much more. It was nice to explore friendship that are not just a group of heterosexual men. The book itself explore so many issues and I got to a point where I wanted to yell at the friends of Jude, telling them to get mental health first aid certificate, and learn how to handle the situation better.

This brings me to all the problems I had with A Little Life; for starters, I felt like Hanya Yanagihara was just piling all the worst situations onto the character of Jude to a point where it was just getting ridiculous. I understand that some people have suffered a lot but in proportion to everyone else in the book, Jude just has to suffer through it all. I began to hate this aspect of the book to the point where if this was not a library book I would have thrown the novel across the room. Everyone focuses on how wonderful this book was for dealing with so many issues, and I agree, but if we dealt with these issues more regularly in fiction and the media then this book would not get the same amount of attention. I found the writing very flat and boring, it was dull. It became a real chore to read through the novel but I was determined to finish A Little Life for the themes.

Congratulations on Hanya Yanagihara for writing a novel that is dealing with so many important issues. A Little Life is great for this and I hope it paves the way for literature in the future. I hope this will begin a shift from the norm where we are constantly reading about white heterosexual males where there only problem is their own self destructive nature (even if I enjoy that in fiction). A Little Life is the crowd favourite to win the Man Booker prize but I really hope it does not win. There is better literature in the short-list, and I do not think A Little Life is a good representation of what they consider ‘good’ fiction.

This review originally appeared on my blog; www.knowledgelost.org/literature/book-reviews/genre/contemporary/a-little-life-by-hanya-yanagihara/