anya
solid 4,5. i came across this book purely by accident and it was a very pleasant surprise. the writing was good and the main character was relatable (but expectedly so). i only wish it hadn't ended so abruptly because i have no idea where i could possibly acquire the next two books and i've become pretty invested in this boy's (own) story
простоватая, пожалуй, для набокова книга с незамысловатым конфликтом и достаточно поверхностным сюжетом
incredibly fucked up but in a beautiful way. gillian flynn i will be charging you for my therapy bill
another shitty yet very entertaining instalment in a series of shitty yet very entertaining books. unfortunately it seems that as long as these keep coming i will keep reading them. i actually enjoyed the characters in this particular book more than in the previous ones.
if goodreads allowed half stars this would be a 3,5 purely because of how lazy the ending is. otherwise the book was pretty good but somewhat bland. if i'm being honest the premise could've had a more interesting execution.
такая простая, такая замечательная книга!
я надеюсь, думаю, что каждое слово в ней — правда. и мне почти верится, что если я однажды доберусь до нью-йорка и приду в вашингтон сквер, там, у фонтана, будет лежать тридцатилетний эдичка лимонов, в деревянных сандалях или невероятных туфлях на высоком каблуке. и я посмотрю ему в глаза, и сразу увижу, что ему в жизни, как и мне, важно только одно — любовь.
4,5
a thrilling and easy read! i devoured it in a few hours. some people in the reviews are complaining about overlong descriptions of The House but honestly i can't imagine thinking that having read more than two books in your lifetime. i did find the ending somewhat underwhelming though, it seemed a bit small for such a large, exhilarating story.
frankly it's a little scary how well michael cunningham is able to portray a woman's suffering
i was very surprised upon finishing this book. i was promised, thousands of times, a “deep exploration of mental illness”, a true centrepiece of the femcel genre. and yet i found little to no debt. were the bell jar and fig tree metaphors really that good? to me this was more a female version of catcher in the rye, if not a worse one (can't say for certain as i haven't revisited catcher since i was 14) with an obnoxious teenage narrator hanging about, acting childish and entitled. take a twelve year old girl's diary and you'll find more emotional depth than “the bell jar” has. if you want a good book about a woman suffering from mental illness i advise you to read “faces in the water” by janet frame instead. maybe if i'd read this in middle school i would have enjoyed it more.
4.5
a good book.
i did not connect with it as much as i did with Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close but i did enjoy the story and safran foer's writing. i love overlong messy books about children who are quirky almost to a point of it being ridiculous and sad middle aged people trying to be normal, sue me. the parts of this book that explore the jewish and american jewish identity were very interesting to read, although i am not jewish and wonder how it would feel to read those passages having the actual cultural background.
to me a very overhyped book with little depth in all the complex subjects it explores. hopefully will be better as a movie
there is a lot to say about this book. there are things that worked for me, and things that didn't, and i get both the praise and the criticism. and before i go into this, i will clarify that i really did like A Little Life, and i did get attached to the characters, and i did find it hard to put down. but here goes.
i read this book at what i feel was the perfect time: as i neared my 18th birthday. and although the lives of the characters span across many, many years, i never felt that they were much older than me, twenty-something at most (which to me was a flaw in the writing). i have also been thinking an awful lot lately, and the book didn't help. in fact, it made me think even more, a scary amount. it also made me cry twice.
however, and this is a point that is important to make with A Little Life: i don't feel that a book is good just because it does a good job making the reader cry. and this book in particular, in my opinion, relies too much on this. i've seen somewhere that Hanya Yanahigara wanted to write a character so broken that they were beyond being fixed, and sure, for that a character would have to suffer, but as you add one traumatic experience and then another and then another, at some point it becomes almost ridiculous. we are just faced with the fact that every single person Jude had encountered until a certain point in his life has been an evil pedophile rapist, with absolutely no exception, and now he will never get better, no matter how loved he is. his sorrow is so enormous that it pushes almost every other character out of focus, and the ones that we still see are shaped by how that sorrow affects them. all we see is his self-harm and self-hatred, to a point where is becomes too much.
curiously, this is the second book i've read recently that people have criticised for being too grim, the first being Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn. and that book, in my opinion, is just as grim as it should be. there is trauma, and pain, but it serves a purpose, and it tells a story. in A Little Life, however, the pain felt like an exhausting rollercoaster meant only to emotionally manipulate the reader, and when things finally get better you don't feel relieved, because deep down you already know that eventually, probably very soon, they'll get worse again, because in this story, nothing is ever truly good, and no one is ever truly happy, and everyone dies, and therapy doesn't work, and suicide is the only way out. we never see the characters grow, or change, or become better people. this book a lot like Jude himself, too stubborn to actually want to get better, but that is disguised by the notion that there are people who are “too broken to be fixed”.
i would like to end the review on this:
apparently, Hanya Yanahigara is anti-therapy, and yet A Little Life was the best ad for therapy i've ever encountered.
4.5
very similar to extremely loud and incredibly close, which makes sense, considering the two authors used to be married. if you really think about it, that fact in itself sounds a little like the plot of this book. and it is a lovely book.
