A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara

It all begins very innocently: four friends of different colors moving to new York to build a career. The Haitian JB (one of the brightest characters of the book) is an artist, gay, selfish and a drama-queen; Mulatto Malcolm – not sure of anything (up to its own orientation), an architect from a very wealthy family; a simple American guy Willem Ragnarsson, whose parents emigrated from Iceland to Sweden and from there fled to Wyoming – actor-waiter with the character of the sisters of mercy, the defender orphaned and poor, a favorite of women. And finally, the unfortunate Jude, St. Francis – people without clan or tribe, an orphan, a cripple, a lawyer, a mathematician and Amateur polyglot, pianist, Shvets, and the Reaper, and on dude igrets. He has what is called a beautiful mind.

But everything about his childhood and private life, Jude defends adamantly, persistently building a new identity, and friends (out of respect and cowardice) for several decades trying not to look in the direction of a huge bright red elephant in the room. Although it is evident that Jude was a child something so bad that irreversibly traumatized him physically and mentally.

Jude’s past is gradually revealed in terse retrospectives, and, honestly, this nightmare could survive, if not parallel, much more, in my opinion, oppressive story line about him growing up and aging. The body is the prison of the soul, a map of our sins and one solid piece of evidence. The body betrays and limits. That’s about in such a relationship, Jude is with her body – ashamed of him and hates. He is proof of the paradox of “man the creature tenacious, but very fragile.” His soul in kataroski wish not to be born at all, not to become a hostage of bodily pain and humiliation.

In some episodes, when belly breathing does not help, you have to pinch yourself, out loud Recalling that this is fiction (and, arrogant and merciless), and these people that Jude does not exist. Yanagihara visualizes every detail so that you are in the middle of the room, in the company of these people,look at these pictures, the interiors of the wound. Smell the shirts and the stench of tear sheets. You’re not in character, but you always come on the heels, running, standing, lying next to him simultaneously shudder from the touch meant to him. It seems that you can reach out and you touch it. But you are nothing, absolutely nothing can help him.

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