5/24/2023 0 Comments Ett litet liv by Hanya YanagiharaThe sober New Yorker became uncharacteristically breathless in describing it as a book that could “drive you mad, consume you, and take over your life”. The reviewer in the Los Angeles Times felt herself unqualified to offer a judgment on the book at all beyond the fact that it was the only novel she had read as a grownup that simply “left sobbing”. The novel, which is both a dislocating meditation on the trauma of child sexual abuse, and a moving tribute to the possibilities and limitations of adult male friendship and love, was widely greeted as a book of landmark honesty – “the most ambitious chronicle of the social and emotional lives of gay men to have emerged for many years” – on publication in America in the spring (though some critics found its graphic descriptions of sexual violence both voyeuristic and too much to bear). It is hard to imagine anyone reading the 734 pages of Hanya Yanagihara’s novel, A Little Life, without being curious about the life of the writer who created it. But then the fact is,” she suggests, “our bodies don’t care about us at all.” “But I love discovering how far a body will go to protect itself, at all costs. That is never an abstract process, though, I say to her.
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