BOOK REVIEW: A Little Life, by Hanya Yanigihara

I hesitated to choose this book.  The review warned of explicit and prolonged sexual abuse, but promised a kind of elevated experience. 

Jude, the main character, endures years of physical and sexual abuse, leaving an unusually gifted child to become an adult with recurring emotional trauma that he struggles with on a minute-by-minute basis. Making of this plot a very long and repetitive novel, which, like "Brooklyn", left me feeling muddied and useless.

I don't know how I can go on, thinking of the shattering destruction of so many millions of human souls. How do THEY go on?  

Most of all, one of my cherished canards, that the experience of natural beauty compensates fully for life's injuries, is found useless.

I didn't come away from this book with any sense of literary style or greatness, but with an enlarged perspective on the difficulty and impossibility of repairing a ruined child. I already knew that.

It's intriguing to me that Jude retains so many loyal friends.  I think that unrealistic, that more likely he would have been an isolate, sinking sooner into madness than he does.

I don't know to whom to recommend this book. Therapists already know it all, and the rest of us have read books and seen films like this already. Think of "Room", of Holocaust narratives, of "The Railway Man".

Maybe this is ultimate example of the genre, and that is a reason.