A Little Life. By Hanya Yanagihara. Doubleday; 720 pages; $30. Picador; £16.99.
WHO would put money on a novel that is so long it weighs well over a kilo and focuses in forensic detail on the trauma of a man who suffered unspeakable physical and sexual abuse as a child? Or on a novel about an intimate, operatic friendship between four men (three black and one white) that is set almost wholly in Manhattan but written by a Japanese-American woman brought up in Hawaii who has never lived long in New York?
Hanya Yanagihara’s second novel, “A Little Life”, is just such a book. Published in America in March and just out in Britain, it is, against all odds, the talk of the season. The Los Angeles Times’s critic confessed to having been left sobbing after reading it, something that had never happened to her before; a writer for the normally unflappable New Yorker said it was a book that could “drive you mad, consume you, and take over your life”. Late last month “A Little Life” stepped on to the first rung of the year’s literary-award ladder, when it...
from The Economist: Books and arts http://ift.tt/1Wm0P3j
No comments:
Post a Comment