I can't even put into words how much I hated this book. ( )

An amazing book, but absolutely harrowing to read. I'll be mulling over this one for a long time. ( )

When my friends had spoken about how heartbreaking this book is, I had smiled and thought to myself that they were exaggerating. I typically don't cry from reading books or watching films, I think I cry more from songs than anything else but this book was as heartbreaking as they come. I had to stop reading it in public for fear of making a spectacle of myself.

This book tells of the story of Jude St. Francis, a man whose history of brutal abuse and trauma and betrayal from those who were meant to love and protect him has made him self-loathing and self-conscious, and the people in his life. I could compare this story to a great whirlpool of sadness and pain, where just as you think the clouds have cleared and there's now a patch of blue sky above you, the dark clouds thicken and you're drawn in again and again.

But to reduce this story to just a story of pain would be unjust, because there is friendship, there is love, there is perseverance and strength. The book is so well written that the emotions it stirs distract from how brilliantly Yanagihara has incorporated her research in Mathematics, Law, Art, Film, Architecture etc. so that it doesn't just serve as details to the story but are very much a part of the structure of the story.

One of the elements I loved from the story was the approach to adulthood. After Jude and his friends finish School and begin their careers, none of them takes the conventional path which is normally, marriage and parenthood. Instead they maintain a steady long-term friendship and have no children. At some point Malcolm, one of Jude's close friends, bemoans the lack of meaning in life because he doesn't have children to which Willem, Jude's closest friend and partner responds: '“I know my life’s meaningful because”—and here he stopped, and looked shy, and was silent for a moment before he continued—“because I’m a good friend. I love my friends, and I care about them, and I think I make them happy.”'

This I believe is the best book I've read this year so far, and although I don't see myself rereading it anytime soon because of how emotionally taxing it was, I am so glad I read it. ( )

I am more than three quarters of the way through this book and I have given myself the right to shelve it. I am not sure how many times "I'm sorry" appears in the novel. All I know is that I am now flinching every time I hear it. Unrelenting behaviour carried on through decades. The author has no problem telling us why people act the way they do but the characters themselves seem unable to do anything except mutter "I'm sorry" throughout all the seemingly non-ending years of friendship. The characters are trapped in a time warp literally (nothing happens in the world) and emotionally. The only development is the author's slow strip tease dance of the seven veils reveal of how many ways one of the characters has suffered. Trust me, there are many. So many. And so, I am sorry. Can't finish this. With friends like these, who needs enemies? ( )

So many other well written reviews … on the whole I did enjoy the book (although enjoy is not the right word), there are some great moments, brilliant descriptions, heart warming emotions, but as someone else has said, it is total “misery porn”.
To some extent it made me think of Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, (is it the name ?!!), just when you thought things can’t possibly get any worse … they do ( )

This is an extremely raw and challenging look at living with trauma. Every character feels so well developed and are easy to connect with, and every sentence is hard hitting and emotional. I'm in love with how beautiful everything is written despite how soul destroying this book is.

The way the characters think, feel and, and act is so powerful. I was sitting there shocked at how perfectly things were described because I've never seen a book hit such a bullseye with how I feel sometimes. It was so refreshing to see a character who doesn't magically recover quickly too, instead showing how self destructive mental health can be.

Having said that, I do think the book went too far in the end... Specifically around the end of "The Happy Years" section. Here, I felt like the story turned from "a well written character study on the effects of extreme trauma" to "look how much life hates this one guy". Everything was still beautifully written, and individually these two halves of the book are amazing. But together? Too much in my opinion.

I also think that sometimes it did drag on. This is one of those books where it looks AND feels long. I feel like I was reading this for ages. I can't tell if I disliked that though.

I really recommend this if you want to ruin your week. ( )

Oof. This is, by far, the most depressing novel I've ever read. And I've read Blood Meridian.

I think there is an argument to be made either way for this book: it's salacious, unrealistic, bloated, and purposefully as dark as it can be for no other reason than it can be; or, it's a realistic portrayal of the effects of abuse and tells the story of someone who goes well beyond and above where he should be able to considering his past.

I think I fall somewhere in the middle. I found the first half of the novel engrossing. The writing is very good and I enjoyed learning about each friend in this group. But somewhere after that halfway point, the novel started to feel *very* repetitive and bloated. I honestly think 100-200 pages could have been cut and the impact would not have been lost.

The relationship between Jude and Willem was....surprising. I don't think I liked it because it felt so forced, but on the other hand the best romantic relationships are built on friendship. I don't know. It was just a little hamfisted to me and probably could've been skipped, saving a lot of pages and getting to the end quicker.

As it stands, it just felt relentless and was exhausting to read. I did enjoy it, but I'm not sure that I *loved* it. ( )

First - trigger warnings - subjects include child abuse and child sexual abuse, neither graphically described but clear enough. Then extremely graphic descriptions of domestic abuse, medical treatments and most distressing to me self-harm. The novel concerns the friendship of four men from college to the end of their lives. The central character, around which all the others seem to revolve, is Jude a man who has been abused physically and sexually throughout his childhood and teenage years, leaving him with physical problems but more particularly mental health issues. Against all the odds he has achieved professional success and financial security, and most of all has a small group of devoted and caring friends. The theme seems to be, will these factors outweigh the horrors of his childhood? This is a powerful work of fiction in which you become involved with the characters (I found myself thinking about them when I was not reading the book). There are many characters I loved, particularly Willem the actor and Harold and his wife Julia. I found myself urging Jude to appreciate his good fortune in having so many caring friends, and cheering when one of them explains to Jude how selfish he appears in some of his actions. This is a long novel (700+ pages), but if you have the stomach for the more triggering subjects it is a moving and worthwhile read. ( )

This book gets a rare 5 stars from me. It is a beautiful tragedy and truly the saddest book I have ever read. If you read other reviews they may go more in depth, just know to read the trigger warnings before you pick this one up. ( )

JudexWillem slash fic ( )

Devestating. Cried the whole way through.


It's long but it feels quick to read. ( )

Not long before tackling ‘A Little Life’, I read a long review of it in the LRB. This gives away a number of plot points, or warns you about them, depending on your perspective. I was thus prepared for the fact that the lead character, Jude, has a horrific past. I was to discover, however, that the review only really spoiled the first half of the book, and there were plenty more terrible events to come. This is a deeply upsetting novel. I am glad that whilst I read the last 300 pages there was a cat asleep in my lap, to provide some comfort. Unless you are extremely strict about knowing nothing about novels before starting them, I’d recommend the LRB review as preparation for ‘A Little Life’. Suffice it to say, this is a very sad book and you need to brace yourself.

Nonetheless, there is also much to enjoy about it. There are many striking portraits of lasting friendship bonds, both literal and figurative. The writing is beautiful, thoughtful, and often profound. An example:

Lately, he had been wondering if codependence was such a bad thing. He took pleasure in his friendships, and it didn’t hurt anyone, so who cared if it was codependent or not? And anyway, how was a friendship any more codependent than a relationship? Why was it admirable when you were twenty-seven but creepy when you were thirty-seven? Why wasn’t friendship as good as a relationship? Why wasn’t it even better? It was two people who remained together, day after day, bound not by sex or physical attraction or money or children or property, but only by the shared agreement to keep going, the mutual dedication to a union that could never be codified. Friendship was witnessing another’s slow drip of miseries, and long bouts of boredom, and occasional triumphs. It was feeling honoured by the privilege of getting to be present for another person’s most dismal moments, and knowing that you could be dismal around him in return.

I also thought this well-expressed and true:

But he and his friends have no children, and in their absence, the world sprawls before them, almost stifling in its possibilities. Without them, one’s status as an adult is never secure; a childless adult creates adulthood for himself, and exhilarating as it often is, it is also a state of perpetual insecurity, of perpetual doubt.

In addition to the parade of terrible events, ‘A Little Life’ is distinctive (as the LRB review notes) for its curiously ahistorical narrative. The characters age, yet the world remains in stasis. This gives it an insular quality: national, let alone global events, never impinge on the characters. Jude reads newspapers, but their contents are not discussed unless the article is about a character. The novel also has a fascination, almost fetishisation, of real estate. Often the places where the characters live appear extensions of themselves, as well as signifiers of their wealth and success. Thus the reader is treated to lavish descriptions of architecture that I personally would find excessive. Perhaps this is an American thing, wanting vast expanses of living space? Why would you want to live on an entire floor of a warehouse building? The only peculiarity I really object to, however, is the relative absence of female characters. There are some, of course, but they remain undeveloped. I wondered if there would ever be an explanation of why Jude lacked emotional attachments to women. Given everything we are told, I find it hard to believe that none of his female contemporaries felt the urge to take care of him. Perhaps they did and he pushed them away - it would have been interesting to know if so. In short, the novel deals with the emotional lives of men, albeit in a very interesting way that does not read as gendered. It also has an original and thought-provoking perspective on sex and its place in relationships.

Although ‘A Little Life’ drips with tragic events, they managed not to feel gratuitous (at times I did want to wail, “No, please, not AGAIN!”). Other readers may disagree, it would depend on your tolerance. On balance, I found the narrative of friendship, family, and the construction of a life with some degree of meaning powerful enough to justify the horrors. I wonder at the deeper messages of the novel, though. I’m not sure what it’s saying about wealth and success; there is some ambivalence about the extent to which these things can bring happiness. Perhaps there is a neoliberal nihilism at the core: money can build you beautiful homes, take you to beautiful places, but ultimately it cannot heal you or save you from death. It is through relationships that your life gains meaning, and although material wealth can enable and enrich such bonds, they cannot be bought.

A final thought that just occurred to me: the phrase Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is not mentioned once throughout the book. How extraordinary. ( )

I finished the book and immediately wanted to rate it five stars because grief was explained so well in the books end. But realistically, there were some things I wished were different.

- The coincidences of every character somehow coming from nothing and becoming millionaires/wealthy/famous is unrealistic.
- When reading, these characters were perpetually 25 years old, regardless of how time shifted. They spoke that way, acted that way, and went about life in certain ways that felt juvenile. This could potentially be fixed if there were some indicators of time and eras. Certain fashion, political or environmental events, or just tweaks in the way a character grows. I guess that's part of the problem too. They didn't seem to grow and so their image didn't either.

I had a little bit more and explained more, but I honestly don't think it's that important anymore. This book was tragic and I think that's essentially the most important thing you need to know going into it. The prose is beautiful. The characters are beautiful. The imagery, dialogue, storytelling, landscape, EVERYTHING was beautiful even with criticism involved. ( )

A most wonderful and difficult to read book. I never give a book a five star rating, but I couldn't give this one any less. This is a story that is so haunting and painful, it will be with me for a long time to come. ( )

Absolutely the most depressing book I've ever read. I wanted to put it down because it was absolutely heart wrenching but I was so hooked on the characters that I couldn't stop. ( )

Here's what I wrote in 2015 about this read: "A lot of child abuse that haunts and never releases the person, a lot of gayness (like a really silly amount), a lot of extreme-ism and over-the-topness (like, all 4 of 4 college friends get rich and famous . . . come on), a lot of talk about this hot-selling 2015 novel. Glad I read it; we'll see to what extent its characters and story stand the (memory) test of time." Quotations in the comments section are my exact kindle highlights. ( )

Arguably the best book I've ever read. Certainly the most traumatic and emotionally-taxing novel I've ever read. A case could be made that it's too traumatic for some readers - I read news articles after I had finished reading the book about the impact that it had on readers, with some being negatively impacted by it. However, the beauty of the writing and the characters outweighs the genuinely upsetting moments in the novel, which are plentiful. I'd love to think I could read another book that will have such a forceful impact on me, but I doubt it. ( )

If I could give more stars, I would. Instantly became one of my favorite books. The writing voice is so different from what I’m used to. It’s so raw and real and human. I bawled for so long during and after reading this. ( )

It took me almost a year to read, as I had to keep taking breaks... breaks from the heartbreak, the pain, the sorrow. But I am so glad I stuck with it; I absolutely loved it. Beautiful, emotional, heart-wrenching, unbearable... but ultimately, beautiful. ( )

This is a melodramatic portrayal of an emotionally damaged trial lawyer and his long-suffering array of fans. He's so beautiful, so talented, so rich, and so very very very very very very very very sad and insecure (but that doesn't interfere with his ability to be the best trial attorney out there!). His personal tragedies are more numerous than Job's. The book cover portrays a man weeping - I don't think he's weeping enough. The cover should be a picture of some martyred saint - Saint Sebastian with all the arrows would be perfect. The end plate could be a woodcut scene of a mob of Victorian men grieving and tearing their clothes.
I hung in there until the end - because after awhile the idea of finishing this thing was akin to summiting Everest. I did the same thing with the ridiculously bloated "And Ladies of the Club". I can proudly say I finished both of these books - but sweet Jebus, I'm never getting the time it took to read them back. ( )

While it’s not unusual for a book to make me cry, it is a little out of the norm for me to burst into tears when talking about a book—which is exactly what happened when I tried to explain this maudlin plot to my husband. This book should come with a warning: it’s melancholic and hard to read in places—everything horrible in a piteous life happens here. It’s Shakespearean tragic. But, it’s also one of the most beautiful stories of friendship I’ve ever read: real and reverent, forgiving and sacrificial, loyal and loving.

This is a decades-long, panoramic friendship saga of four college friends: JB, an indulgent, insecure, self-involved but, also, lovable artist; Willem, a charming, good-looking actor who’s fiercely protective and loyal; Malcolm, an architect who craves propriety and struggles with guilt and indecision; and Jude, an intensely private and serious litigator with an obscure, traumatic past. The story follows these friends passionately pursuing their dreams after college in NYC with the peaks and valleys of their friendship as the focal point of this narrative. While they see themselves as a unit, it’s really Jude at the center of it all, as the sun they all orbit around. However, Jude sees himself only as “an extravagant collection of problems,” even though everyone around him, everyone who gets pulled in as if by centripetal force, deeply desires to help him move past the extreme trauma of a childhood that has scarred him both physically and emotionally (392).

In this story of friendship and, ultimately, of love, it asks the question of whether or not love is enough to save someone—whether or not that person thinks they’re worthy of being saved. If my previous warnings of trauma don’t scare you off, I highly recommend this lit-fic read. Other than being a little too long and having too many terrible things happen to these characters—some more than others, some of Job-like proportions, moving it from reality to something more mythic, too incredulous to believe—it really is a beautiful story of friendship and love that’s worth all 720 pages, a 4.5 star read. ( )

I cannot remember ever shedding a tear over a novel before, but this one made me do it, more than once even. An astonishing accomplishment, Ms. Yanagihara, who has said in interviews:

"This book adheres to many of the conventions of the classic Western fairy tale: there’s a child in distress, who’s made to face challenges on his own. The era is suggested rather than named. There are no conventional parental figures, in particular mother figures. (Like many fairy tales, I hope this book is defined as much by its absences as its presences.) And yet, unlike a fairy tale, this book concerns itself more with the characters’ emotional response to these challenges and events than the circumstances themselves; I tried to meld the psychological specificity of a naturalistic contemporary novel with the suspended-time quality of a fable. Part of fairy tales’ lasting power is attributable to the fact that they never address their characters’ inner lives (a relatively modern literary concept, that); the particulars of the plot are generally far more important than the characters themselves. With A Little Life, I tried to do the opposite."

"I will just say that there is, in a significant number of these stories [fairy tales]–across cultures, across countries–a stubborn lack of redemption. Sometimes the good child is rewarded, and the bad witch punished, but just as often, they’re not: or what must be endured by the hero or heroine is so terrible, so grotesque, that happiness, usually in the form of marriage or a reunion, seems almost meaningless, an unsatisfying answer to outlandish feats of survival."

"I wanted there to be something too much about the violence in the book, but I also wanted there to be an exaggeration of everything, an exaggeration of love, of empathy, of pity, of horror. I wanted everything turned up a little too high."

"I do think that men, almost uniformly, no matter their race or cultural affiliations or religion or sexuality, are equipped with a far more limited emotional toolbox. Not endemically, perhaps – but there’s no society that I know of that encourages men to put words to the sort of feelings – much less encourages their expression of those feelings – that women get to take for granted. Maybe this is changing with younger men, but I sometimes listen to my male friends talk, and can understand that what they’re trying to communicate is fear, or shame, or vulnerability–even as I find it striking that they’re not even able to name those emotions, never mind discuss their specificities; they talk in contours, but not in depth... As a writer, it’s a great gift–and an interesting challenge–to write about a group of people who are fundamentally limited in this way (and who happen to be half the world’s population)."

"One of the things I wanted to do with this book is create a character who never gets better. And, relatedly, to explore this idea that there is a level of trauma from which a person simply can’t recover. I do believe that really, we can sustain only a finite amount of suffering. That amount varies from person to person and is different, sometimes wildly so, in nature; what might destroy one person may not another. So much of this book is about Jude’s hopefulness, his attempt to heal himself, and I hope that the narrative’s momentum and suspense comes from the reader’s growing recognition — and Jude’s — that he’s too damaged to ever truly be repaired, and that there’s a single inevitable ending for him." ( )

I think I would have loved this book if it were shorter. I'm not adverse to long books (in fact, I've declared 2024 the YOBB, or Year of Big Books in an attempt to get some weightier reads off my shelves). This book could have been great, but it went on so long I got bored and/or frustrated. I became so sick of Jude's and Willem's relationship where they constantly seemed to be apologizing for failing to understand the other. I started to think that Jude's backstory had just too many traumatic events and evil people in it. I even started to wonder what all the other characters saw in Jude anyway.

Given the strong characters and heart-wrenching plot, I shouldn't have had these thoughts. But things dragged on. I still liked it, but didn't find it great. ( )

The characters in this moving book will stay with me for a long time, not just Jude St. Francis, but those in his orbit as well: Willem Ragnarsson, Jean Batpiste “JB” Marion, Malcolm Irvine, Harold Stein, Julia Altman, Andy, Richard. While we know immediately this is no ordinary coming of age story, the general framework is just that. For several decades, we follow the lives of four gifted young men who met in college in Boston, went to separate grad schools, and all wound up in New York City as they each achieve success in their careers. But, at the center, we come to know Jude most—the one who those who love him know so little about. It is not an easy book, peeling away the layers of horrifying traumas Jude endured as a child. Heart-wrenching, devastating, outrageous, disturbing, but deftly and beautifully written. I thought it dragged a bit in the last quarter of the book (711 pages) and sometimes the metaphors missed the mark, but overall, unflinchingly powerful. ( )

Book club choice. Epic read. Thoughtful and harrowing. 4 friends meet at college aged about 17. Main character is Jude, whose life has been a nightmare of abuse from birth. As an adult he is a very successful lawyer, but ruined by having been told he is worthless through childhood. Some things do go well for him in adult life, most importantly his relationship with Willem, but the end is tragedy. I had hoped for a happy ending, but this is more authentic given his history. A difficult emotional rollercoaster of a read. ( )