A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara
This book is known to be extremely depressing which you’ll definitely end up bawling your eyes out, statistic from bookstagram shows. Even my friends said so. That said, you know my expectation was high.
I bought this book about 1.5 years ago in Singapore as a souvenir for myself. Believe it or not, I spent a year reading this. I paused at 1/3 because I got annoyed that the story wasn’t picking up. During the pause, I read 2 to 3 novels before I got back to A Little Life again. Giving you a general picture of how annoyed I was.
I was so excited to start reading it. The internet hyped it up for sure. Oh my… and the algorithm really be showing me all the A Little Life posts. One thing that amazed me was that there’s no spoiler in all these posts. They’re more of highlighting the emotional ride you’ll be getting on when reading it.
As I’d come to the first half of it, it’s mostly the background about Jude, and the tight friendship of the 4 main characters – Jude, JB, Malcom, and Willem. After that, that’s when Jude’s traumatising experiences surfaced, his childhood, how he was being treated when he was a kid. Even though there were happy memories here and there, his life was built by trauma over trauma. Because of that, Jude thought he didn’t deserve happiness.
Layer after layer of trauma, it made me think: how can someone be so depressed and not do anything about it? As I read on, I realised I was in no position to say that, even in real life. It’s the life experiences that one has gone through to make them think that they don’t deserve certain things, that they did something wrong in life, and no matter what we say to them, to change their mind of otherwise, it’s no use; because we’re not them. And sometimes, we can only be there for them, support them as they fight through their own battle, be kind to them, to everyone.
After the first half of the book, the timeline got quite jumpy to me. It was later not only were the months and years went by super quick, so was the plot. In one sentence or a few paragraphs, it’s already another timestamp. It made me feel like it was in a rush to wrap up the book. Despite that, Hanya’s writing skills are highly complimented, that the details in each page of emotions touch my heart slowly and deeply. Well, I shed about 8 tears in total, to be accurate.
What I didn’t see it coming was Willem’s death. I remember taking a peak at the last few pages, and I saw someone died. I thought it was Jude, but turned out it’s Willem. He was all Jude had, to help him get through his battle. While the controversial part is that we should never rely on someone when we heal ourselves, that’s the way we’re taught. As much as Jude had been trying to find his way out within himself, he found Willem to be his “only cure”. When Willem died, I found myself feeling sorry for Jude, too, that everything in his life seemed to be taken away from him, the good things, and really, no one deserves that.
While the novel mainly focuses on Jude, looking at it more holistically, Jude, JB, Malcom, Willem, and Harold, are all fighting something in their own life, at their own pace; they’re all a little mysterious in their own sorrow, yet sorting their way out of it, hoping to save themselves or to be saved, one way or another – they’re all fighting in life. Just like everyone of us.
Even though I didn’t enjoy the first half of the novel as much as I expected and wanted to, I knew this novel was going to be special for me. This is definitely a very sensitive book since it contains heaps and heaps of trauma which everyone can somehow resonate at some point. But slowly, Jude had become a friend of mine that I had to check up on every night.
