To Paradise

To Paradise is a hopeless book. It doesn't start like this, it's not immediately noticeable, starting as a story of love, but as it progresses the cracks begin to show and you almost become resigned to the dissipitation of what people were dreaming of at the start– never outright depression, more so a resignation, a feeling of helpfulness, of being stuck, of making mistakes but this seeming like an inevitability.

This is essentially a collection of two connected novellas and one novel.

In the first one, we explore what I was initially expecting to be an alternate history novel handling the topic of slavery, but instead turned out to be an exploration of independence (as a person and a people), infatuation and insecurity. It's a tragic tale at heart, deliberately unsatisfying, would make for an interesting standalone story. The world is barely explored and served solely as background for the characters, which is what the story is very much focused on.

The hinted paradise feels palatable, somewhat uncertain, but well within reach.

The second part is where we start getting to the real meat. A deftly woven story of (broken) cultural identity, an almost epistolary novella from the perspective by one who is invisible to the people around him, a dark story told in a nuanced way.

The paradise feels like an near impossibility, out of grasp, a dwindling chance.

The third part... This one felt the most like The People in the Trees to me, an escalation of depression, emotionally overwhelming, as we slowly unravel the truth of a society slowly becoming more and more dystopic, in a world ravaged by constant pandemics, where the internet has practically been banned because of its danger– where conspiracy theorists are rampant, marriages are mandatory, and most people are broken.

No paradise to be found here. Instead, the concept of paradise is a cruel joke, an obvious unfeasability, a bitter unreality.

This was not as much as a tearjerker as The People in The Trees, which I'm thankful for. Her melodramatic tendencies, reminiscent of Guy Gavriel Kay, always felt a bit juvenile to me. I haven't read A Little Life yet but from what I've heard it's much the same. To Paradise is not that, I was hoping, feeling like the maturation of Yanagihara as an author, less focused on the emotional. Unfortunately, by the third part, it feels like tortureporn again.