A little life : a novel

by Hanya Yanagihara

Paper Book, 2015

Status

Available

Call number

Fiction Yanagihara

Barcode

12363

Publication

New York : Doubleday, [2015]

Description

"When four classmates from a small Massachusetts college move to New York to make their way, they're broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition ... Over the decades, their relationships deepen and darken, tinged by addiction, success, and pride. Yet their greatest challenge, each comes to realize, is [their center of gravity] Jude, ... by midlife a terrifyingly talented litigator yet an increasingly broken man, his mind and body scarred by an unspeakable childhood, and haunted by what he fears is a degree of trauma that he'll not only be unable to overcome--but that will define his life forever"--Amazon.com.

Media reviews

Stylist [Issue 338]
I'm still talking about A Little Life. It's deeply upsetting, but I think it's a wonderfull story in the end.
4 more
Hanya Yanagihara schrijft in Een klein leven duidelijk voor haar lezer, ze manipuleert je met perfect getimede overgangen: van feel good naar feel bad en terug. Alle personages hebben maar één eigenschap, het zijn sjablonen. Ergerlijk. En toch weet het boek iets te raken.
In the end, her novel is little more than a machine designed to produce negative emotions for the reader to wallow in—unsurprisingly, the very emotions that, in her Kirkus Reviews interview, she listed as the ones she was interested in, the ones she felt men were incapable of expressing: fear,
Show More
shame, vulnerability. Both the tediousness of A Little Life and, you imagine, the guilty pleasures it holds for some readers are those of a teenaged rap session, that adolescent social ritual par excellence, in which the same crises and hurts are constantly rehearsed.
Show Less
Je kunt je afvragen waarom de mensen rond Jude St. Francis zoveel kunnen houden van iemand die hen steeds weer door de vingers glipt, die zijn geschiedenis verborgen houdt en die een bron is van zorgen en frustraties. Tot je merkt dat je zelf die liefde bent gaan voelen, inclusief de angst die
Show More
erbij hoort. Het verraadt dat in A Little Life iets wezenlijks wordt aangeraakt.
Show Less
Yanagihara’s success in creating a deeply afflicted protagonist is offset by placing him in a world so unrealized it almost seems allegorical, with characters so flatly drawn they seem more representative of people than the actual thing. This leaves the reader, at the end, wondering if she has
Show More
been foolish for taking seriously something that was merely a contrivance all along.
Show Less

Awards

National Book Award (Finalist — Fiction — 2015)
Booker Prize (Longlist — 2015)
Women's Prize for Fiction (Longlist — 2016)
Dublin Literary Award (Shortlist — 2017)
Kirkus Prize (Finalist — Fiction — 2015)

Language

Original publication date

2015

Physical description

720 p.; 25 cm

ISBN

9780385539258
Page: 1.6747 seconds