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Critics' Opinion:
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First Published:
Mar 2015, 736 pages
Paperback:
Jan 2016, 736 pages
Book Reviewed by:
Poornima Apte
Buy This Book
Brace yourself for the most astonishing, challenging, upsetting, and profoundly moving book in many a season. An epic about love and friendship in the twenty-first century that goes into some of the darkest places fiction has ever traveled and yet somehow improbably breaks through into the light. Truly an amazement - and a great gift for its publisher.
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cruel Brooklyn-born painter seeking entry to the art world; Malcolm, a frustrated architect at a prominent firm; and withdrawn, brilliant, enigmatic Jude, who serves as their center of gravity.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 hymn to brotherly love, a masterful depiction of heartbreak, and a dark examination of the tyranny of memory and the limits of human endurance.
1
The eleventh apartment had only one closet, but it did have a sliding glass door that opened onto a small balcony, from which he could see a man sitting across the way, outdoors in only a T-shirt and shorts even though it was October, smoking. Willem held up a hand in greeting to him, but the man didn't wave back.
In the bedroom, Jude was accordioning the closet door, opening and shutting it, when Willem came in. "There's only one closet," he said.
"That's okay," Willem said. "I have nothing to put in it anyway."
"Neither do I." They smiled at each other. The agent from the building wandered in after them. "We'll take it," Jude told her.
But back at the agent's office, they were told they couldn't rent the apartment after all. "Why not?" Jude asked her.
"You don't make enough to cover six months' rent, and you don't have anything in savings," said the agent, suddenly terse. She had checked their credit and their bank accounts and had at last ...
"The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there." These memorable opening lines might belong to another brilliant novel (The Go-Between, by L. P. Hartley) but they could well form the essential scaffolding for A Little Life, a wrenching yet illuminating exploration of how child abuse can exert a suffocating grip on adulthood...continued
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(Reviewed by Poornima Apte).
One of the many astute portrayals in A Little Life is the closely knit group of friends to which Jude St. Francis, the haunted protagonist, belongs. While the literal coming-of-age happens during the teen years, it could be argued that college, for those who attend, is the real deal. It is a transformative experience for most people, and they forge friendships that form an essential support network when they are cast out into the real world. These relationships are more than the rose-colored variety as depicted by television sitcoms such as Friends. Indeed A Little Life follows its core group: Jude, Willem, JB and Malcolm, over the course of three decades showing how the course of a life can bruise or fortify friendships.
Here are some ...
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