A Little Life - Hanya Yanagihara

After I had finished reading A Little Life, I got up and splashed my face with water and looked up at the mirror above the sink and realised my eyes were red due to the tears that came at the end and even after it. While I wiped myself with a towel I also suddenly felt an urge to weep, almost on the brink. But later I wondered why, why did I feel so?

This novel has become a bestseller and was nominated for the Man Booker Prize 2015. It took Hanya 18 months to write this book. She has done a splendid job with this novel considering that the subject was handled very delicately keeping in mind its fragility.

I find it hard to comment on the book, it made me feel, feel many things that I did not anticipate. Though it is said in a summary on the very first page that it, the story is about four friends but really it is centred on Jude and his friends who play an important role and at the same time how their life gets influenced by Jude. Many people have said that the book kept them reading in the nights; well it is a good thing that I avoided that. I had to try hard not to. The book plays with the emotions of the reader no matter how much power he/she has over their emotions. The book gave me goose bumps, sometimes I had to remind myself that it was just a story and that it was not real. This sounds stupid and I know that but then the characters feel so real, everything about them is there in the book and it is written with such honesty that you feel like you are watching memories. These characters age and you feel you have aged believing their reality and their experiences, they feel at conflict and then you face a conflict with yourself wondering why you are reading this and what made it so intense.

The novel does depict the life of four friends: Jude, Willem, JB and Malcolm who met in college. She makes the book about Jude’s tale but she has written the stories of the other boys and the characters apart from them with genuine honesty that makes them feel real. The characterisation is done greatly. I believe that great characters makes a good plot great and this book is an example of it even though it is very long and excruciating, it is very much worth it and an exclusive experience.

This book reveals the motley of emotions that humans experience. It is not that these emotions have been exaggerated with adjectives from a thesaurus but its simplicity is beautiful the way it is conveyed which make the reader sway left to right from bliss to the pit with a thud and a swish. It makes the reader feel the very joy, anger, sadness, tension, and fear that Malcolm, JB, Willem and Jude and Harold feel. I found that I had connected with Harold the most who is one of the tertiary characters and I sympathised with him the most.

At times I realised that the book stimulated a thought in my brain that if I were to write a book then I would want it to have what A Little Life, that essence that makes you feel so small and still so happy with it, with those tears and someone beside to shed them with.

This book is like a journey one of its kind that is difficult to take and you’d wish it to go on and on. This book gives you the memories the reader won’t find elsewhere. Though there is much more to say I believe that I must contain the rest within me and enjoy it, relive it and miss it every minute.