Prepare to Ugly Cry: A Little Life Book Review
There are many things to consider when choosing a book to read. I am sure many of you avid readers have your own methods in picking and selecting your next read, be it from trusted sources like friends, teachers, and professors, and last but not least: the internet. For me personally, the first and quite reliable source to look for book ratings and reviews is on Goodreads website. I always go there and search for what people are saying before buying any book. I do not specifically read all the reviews though, I just read the summary and skimmed through some of the top reviews — good or bad — and make mental notes on whether the book is worth buying or reading.
So, when my fellow bookworm friends were excitedly talking about one book from this highly praised female author that is very depressing and sad to read, to the point where you need to be in a good headspace to read else you will succumb to the character’s pain and feel depressed yourself, it immediately piqued my interest. I looked it up on Goodreads, read some of the top-rated reviews, and the 4.33 out of 5 stars rating was enough to get me to start reading.
A Little Life tells a story about four best friends; Jude, a mysterious lawyer with tan skin and beautiful green eyes, Willem, an aspiring actor working part time as a waiter, Jean-Baptiste (JB), a black artist of Haitian heritage and Malcolm, a biracial man working in an architecture firm with rich parents. The author, Hanya Yanagihara, tells the story of their friendship from early twenties to their sixties. You can see how the characters’ lives progressed over the decades.
The author starts off with introducing the reader to the gang by telling their lives and backgrounds and slowly but surely brings our attention to Jude as the main character. Little by little, the readers get to peek inside Jude’s head and understand why he is such a mysterious and reserved character, even to his best friends. The way Yanagihara mostly uses inner monologues instead of dialogues makes it special because it really gets the readers to understand the characters’ emotions and aspirations better. Also, I like her storytelling style where she brings the readers forward and backward by jumping from one timeline to another. I think it is unique and unusual to the most novels I have read before.
However, in the middle of the book I understand makes this book very dark and depressing. Yanagihara doesn’t shy away from describing graphic and gruesome details of Jude’s trauma-filled childhood. There are parts of the book that haunts me, like how Jude was sexually abused on a regular basis by the priests that were supposed to protect him ever since he was little, or how Jude was forced into prostitution by Brother Luke, one of the priests, at the tender age of nine. All this unfortunate events from his upbringing made it impossible for Jude to heal completely, to the point where he never trusted anyone in his life, even his adopted parents and Willem, his bestfriend-turned-lover. The way the author portrays Jude as someone that can never be salvaged because of his traumatic childhood was enough to convince me that this book is misery and torture porn at best. There were times where I felt like Jude’s character was created only to be tortured by the author; it was never-ending and gut-wrenching.
Other thing I don’t find convincing was the chemistry between Jude, Willem, JB and Malcolm. At the beginning, all of them were important characters and you would think that they were the main focus of the book. Like I mentioned before, they have been best friends since they were young adults and each of them even has individual chapters in the beginning of the book. As you progressed though, you would find that JB and Malcolm were just supplemental characters. Yanagihara focused too much on slowly revealing Jude’s upbringing that she neglected to weave the story about how JB and Malcom’s are also Jude and Willem’s best friends. Even Richard — a friend of the gang and Jude’s “landlord” — and Jude’s friendship were somewhat tighter than Jude and JB or Malcolm’s.
Toward the end, especially from The Happy Years part onwards, was when things took turn from dark and depressing to heartbreaking and sorrowful. I could really understand how a broken person see the world through Jude’s eyes. As someone who has also experienced traumatic incidents in her life, Jude’s feelings, emotions and traumas resonated well with me. His struggle to stay afloat despite his inner voices he called “hyenas” that kept on telling him to drown and his dull instincts that made him put his trusts on the wrong person are the things that I once struggled with in my life.
I didn’t realize how much I like Jude and how I was touched by his story and his life that I genuinely wished that things would get better for him. I needed to keep reminding myself that this was just a work of fiction to avoid being too emotionally attached. Still, this book broke my heart to a thousand pieces and made me ugly cry all night long. I might be biased here, but all those flaws about the book I mentioned in the previous paragraphs are somewhat “forgivable”, given how powerful it is and how much I am affected by this book in the end.
Overall, this book deserves all the praises and I recommend it to everyone, as long as you are in the right headspace to read it. Of course, I give A Little Life a five out of five stars rating in its Goodreads page.
