A Little Life by
Hanya Yanagihara
My rating:
3 of 5 stars
"x=x "is the most tragic sentence I have ever read. It comes about half way through the book, and it hit with a powerful gut punch that left you gasping for air. The story should have stopped at that point. Up until then, the story of four college kids was beautifully unfurled as each of them start embarking on their careers. The story comes to center on Jude, one of the four who refuses to reveal his past (which you know must be ugly), and is slightly physically disabled from a "car injury". Somehow he finds himself not only included but a person for whom the most thoughtful of kindnesses are done for him, especially by his best friend, William. But halfway through the book Jude finds himself in tragic circumstances....if we were to end the book there, it wouldn't be happy, but from that point on the dynamic writing of the first half changes to a sort of plodding exposition of life; it dilutes the the power of the first half. The narrative gets smaller, and the other characters lives are only revealed through interactions with Jude. Even Williams point of view chapters only reveal interactions with Jude, only touching briefly on what his life as an actor is like. Nothing really changes from that point on, anyway-- in the end, it is as though the book had stopped at 50% anyway.
Also, while the narrative is admittedly beautifully written, the plot points seem rather far fetched. Jude's life seems overbearingly tragic. The four end up fabulously successful and wealthy. (Really, all four?) And the characters are amazingly brutal or incredibly, unbelieveably kind. JB is the only character who has any kind of growth arch, or complicated feeleings/motives...perhaps Yangihara could write a sequel about him?
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his family was happy when he was happy, and so his only obligation to them was to be happy, to live exactly the life he wanted, on the terms he wanted.
When did pursuing your ambitions cross the line from brave into foolhardy? How did you know when to stop?
But these were days of self-fulfillment, where settling for something that was not quite your first choice of a life seemed weak-willed and ignoble. Somewhere, surrendering to what seemed to be your fate had changed from being dignified to being a sign of your own cowardice. There were times when the pressure to achieve happiness felt almost oppressive, as if happiness were something that everyone should and could attain, and that any sort of compromise in its pursuit was somehow your fault.
He had lost the ability to imagine anything.
suety yellow.
the Constitution itself is a contract, albeit a malleable contract, and the question of just how malleable it is, exactly, is where law intersects with politics
In this class you will learn the difference between what is fair and what is just, and, as important, between what is fair and what is necessary
how they had left him to himself, a blank, faceless prairie under whose yellow surface earthworms and beetles wriggled through the black soil, and chips of bone calcified slowly into stone.
the U.S. Attorney himself would emerge onto the floor and all the assistant prosecutors would buzz toward him, mothlike, as a multitude of gray suits.
“If I were a different kind of person, I might say that this whole incident is a metaphor for life in general: things get broken, and sometimes they get repaired, and in most cases, you realize that no matter what gets damaged, life rearranges itself to compensate for your loss, sometimes wonderfully. “Actually—maybe I am that kind of person after all.
But what Andy never understood about him was this: he was an optimist. Every month, every week, he chose to open his eyes, to live another day in the world.
would think how absurd it was that my child, that any child, could expect to survive this life. It seemed as improbable as the survival of one of those late-spring butterflies—you know, those little white ones—I sometimes saw wobbling through the air, always just millimeters away from smacking itself against a windshield.
And let me tell you two other things I learned. The first is that it doesn’t matter how old that child is, or when or how he became yours. Once you decide to think of someone as your child, something changes, and everything you have previously enjoyed about them, everything you have previously felt for them, is preceded first by that fear. It’s not biological; it’s something extra-biological, less a determination to ensure the survival of one’s genetic code, and more a desire to prove oneself inviolable to the universe’s feints and challenges, to triumph over the things that want to destroy what’s yours.
when it’s your child, a part of you, a very tiny but nonetheless unignorable part of you, also feels relief. Because finally, the moment you have been expecting, been dreading, been preparing yourself for since the day you became a parent, has come. Ah, you tell yourself, it’s arrived. Here it is. And after that, you have nothing to fear again.
“Fair” is never an answer, I would tell them. But it is always a consideration.
Failure also made people boring, but in a different way: failing people were constantly striving for one thing—success. But successful people were also only striving to maintain their success. It was the difference between running and running in place, and although running was boring no matter what, at least the person running was moving, through different scenery and past different vistas.
He is so lonely that he sometimes feels it physically, a sodden clump of dirty laundry pressing against his chest.
the point of a child is not what you hope he will accomplish in your name but the pleasure that he will bring you, whatever form it comes in, even if it is a form that is barely recognizable as pleasure at all—and, more important, the pleasure you will be privileged to bring him.
They all—Malcolm with his houses, Willem with his girlfriends, JB with his paints, he with his razors—sought comfort, something that was theirs alone, something to hold off the terrifying largeness, the impossibility, of the world, of the relentlessness of its minutes, its hours, its days.
he was old enough now to know that within every relationship was something unfulfilled and disappointing, something that had to be sought elsewhere.
now he knew: you always sacrificed something. The question was what you sacrificed.
He now viewed a successful relationship as one in which both people had recognized the best of what the other person had to offer and had chosen to value it as well.
his responsibility was not to make him better but to make him less sick.
And so he fears he is grieving not so much for Willem but for his own life: its smallness, its worthlessness.
was the determination to keep living not a choice at all, but an evolutionary implementation? Was there something in the mind itself, a constellation of neurons as toughened and scarred as tendon, that prevented humans from doing what logic so often argued they should?
What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions by Randall Munroe
