A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara
In three words: meandering, devastating, raw.
"Friendship, companionship: it so often defied logic, so often eluded the deserving, so often settled itself on the old, the bad, the peculiar, the damaged."
A Little Life is one of those books that is hard to read both because of its subject matter and simply because it is so long. It follows the lives of a group of friends - Jude, JB, Malcolm and Willem - from college till their later years, and while each of the four does get parts dedicated to them, there is one person that this story centres around. The reason this book is so difficult to stomach is that this person has had an incredibly traumatic childhood, the mental and physical effects of which he still lives with, and which affect the lives of those around him too. The characters were all well drawn and fleshed out, and the deep friendship they shared was beautifully conveyed. Because we follow them for several decades, you do get a sense of getting to know them, and I think Yanagihara did this very well.
As well as the POV of the central four, we also get sections written in the first person, and it's not immediately obvious who this person is and what their relationship to the group is. This kind of leads me to my main complaint, which was that although I did enjoy reading Yanagihara's writing overall, I was constantly frustrated by how unclear it often was and kept having to double back to figure out who the 'he' in a sentence was referring to. Yes, in some cases it was pretty obvious, but there were plenty of points at which I had to pause, and this ruined the flow for me. To add to the confusion further, the plot meandered quite a lot; past events were remembered by a character and then covered in a fair amount of detail, and we also had that extra POV I just talked about, in which it would go from being 'he' to 'I' and 'you'. I tend to struggle with following jumps between time periods anyway, and I much prefer it when periods are clearly defined (e.g. Chapter X, 1991; or Chapter X, 5 years ago).
While this book is definitely emotionally devastating (Yanagihara doesn't shy away from graphic descriptions of abuse, self-harm and that one character's desperately painful childhood), I didn't actually cry. I teared up a few times, but I didn't properly cry even though I had expected to! I didn't really become invested in the story till I was a few hundred pages in (this book is over 700 pages long), which I think was partly because I was reading two other books at the same time (pro tip: I don't recommend being a book polygamist with A Little Life!) and also the unclear/ambiguous writing was irritating me.
Recommended for: ... well. It's kind of hard to recommend A Little Life, in a way. This book has so many triggers that I can imagine it wouldn't be appropriate for certain people. If you do pick it up, be prepared to be hit hard by emotions - there are happy points in the book, but I'd say they are few and far between. It's also a book to give your full attention to, rather than reading snippets of it here and there.
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