It’s been hard to write about Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life. Hard to find words for how affecting I found the novel, how much I appreciated it. I really, really, emphatically, as loud as I’ve ever claimed it, think this is a brilliant novel. It’s not worth it to have best lists, I get it. But if I was someone who kept best lists (okay, I do) this one would be near the top. I can’t think of a book in recent (or any?) memory that has lived so fully in my mind, has occupied such a significant place in my thinking while – and after – I was reading it. Note I didn’t say “enjoyed” – it’s a hard story to live within, and you really will live within it (and for days and weeks after you finish it – it’s still following me around). It’s a long book, but you won’t notice the length, except maybe the anxiety of realizing you only have half of it left, the worry that eventually the last page will come. It’s a book that wants you to feel deeply and succeeds through masterful – truly – narration and character development in making you feel so. much. Continue reading
Tag Archives: Booker Prize
A Little Life: The Best Thing You Will Read. Emphatic plea for you to read this book.
Filed under American literature, Bestseller, Book Club, Erin's Favourite Books, Fiction, Prize Winner
Remains of the Day: Downtown Abbey Fans Take Note
Imagine a book about a butler. A butler on a road trip. In the 1920s. Remembering his time being a butler. Polishing the silver. Straightening the pantry. Dealing with inconstant maids and footmen. You’d think: this book can’t be that exciting. Because butlers and descriptions of floral arrangements are not that exciting. Because your standards of good books are dictated by the ratio of exciting to explosion. But you don’t need to imagine much because you’ve been watching Downtown Abbey for the last five years and you’re already sold on the impossibly fascinating quality of finding yourself in a changing society: shifting understandings of class and gender, fading attachment to the aristocratic standards of manner and decorum. You already appreciate how enthralling it can be to extrapolate the upheaval of a society through close observation of a handful of characters as they attempt – unsuccessfully – to hold on to their traditions, expectations for decorum and propriety.
The question then shifts from will you be interested (you absolutely will – this is a (perhaps unexpectedly) enthralling read) to why is the story so engrossing? What is it about The Remains of the Day that had this reader utterly absorbed? Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel follows Stevens, a classic butler trained for the height of 19th century aristocratic estates, as he finds himself without friends, family or meaningful employment (his beloved Lord has been disgraced and he finds himself in the employ of a (gasp) American), when the best years of his life are behind him and he is made to confront the question of what has given – and gives – his life meaning. As Stevens putters his car across the English countryside we likewise meander through his memories, recalling his years with Lord Darlington. More than memories, we explore with Stevens his ideas about what makes for great service, the behaviours and attitudes of living with ‘dignity,’ the sisyphean struggle to adapt not simply a personality, but an identity, to a changed political and social landscape.
For this reader the most fascinating questions Stevens mines are those related to labour. He fiercely defends a life led in service of others, the deferral of desire and autonomy to a benevolent and wiser master and the subsumption of choice or opinion to those of the wiser ruling class – the force of his defense suggesting the precarity of the beliefs, safeguarded up by his staunch refusal to entertain their vulnerability. Stevens sees value in his job – which to him is not a ‘job’ at all, but an identity and life – of serving others, always and necessarily serving, never questioning, never doubting the paternal protection of his Lord. We are meant to question this unshakable faith, meant to see his abnegation of love for Ms Keaton, his deferral of desire, his ambition to be the finest butler of the greatest dignity as not apathy but a blindness to his own subjugation. That ultimately leaves him alone and lonely, without a sense of place or purpose.
Of course the obvious argument is that we read (and watch Downtown Abbey) with such attention because we find ourselves in a moment of similar change. Offered the opportunity to challenge accepted categories (most notably for the novel) of class, we continue to generate excuses for the continuation of our own service, rationales for a status quo that does not benefit the majority but is nevertheless defended because it promises stability.
So think what you will about a book about a butler taking a road trip. And then read it. And be blown away. But not so blown away that you have to change. Because nobody wants that.
Filed under Book Club, British literature, Fiction, Prize Winner
The Green Road: What we mean when we say ‘a good book’
Imagine you’ve just finished reading a good book. You put it down and you think to yourself, ‘gosh, that was a really good book’ (okay, you probably don’t say ‘gosh’). You try to put your finger on what made it good. If someone asks you about it, you don’t hesitate to tell them to read it, but you probably don’t go out of your way to recommend it. You think about the characters again for a few days, but then the specificity of their story seeps into a wider feeling you have about the book: it was good.
I’ve just finished Anne Enright’s The Green Road and I can safely report it’s a good book. The writing is at once grand in its capacity and small in its attention on detailed, particular moments. With a compelling use of a shifting third person limited narration, the plot traces the Madigan family over decades. Each long chapter follows one of the four children in a specific moment in time, richly evoking place and character. Each successive chapter moves chronological leaps forward, always toward something. That something is the eventual family reunion when all children are gathered at their childhood home for Christmas.
It wouldn’t be an outrageous argument to claim these chapters are linked short stories, such is the telescopic focus on the one child, the particular time and place. For instance, the (best) chapter following Dan through the gay community in the 1980s, AIDS ravaged New York, is a tight story unto itself. Even while the development of Dan’s character comes to have resonance in the eventual reunion chapter such that this earlier chapter is necessary for the latter, the chapter could be self-contained for its own sake.
To this point on the function of the character-focused chapters: Perhaps because the mother in the story, Rosaleen, does not get a chapter onto herself (in this way the form mirrors the message that she has devoted her sense of self entirely to serving her children), the climactic moments that focus on her feel less pressing than they might had we had time to connect with her first-hand. That said, the children’s reaction to these climactic scenes give the reader a firm sense of the importance and reverberations of the moments.
It’s a good book for exploring questions of familial loyalty, of how and when identity becomes fixed, of who we want to be versus who we might actually be, and of what we owe our family (read ‘owe’ as broadly as you can: what debts we aim to repay, what we have because of them, what obligations are due). These questions get worked out in individual chapters and across the whole with each successive chapter adding layer and echo as the reader comes to piece together both chronology and family hierarchies.
A good book, then, is one that is well written, with strong character development and thematically rich. It’s not a great book because it doesn’t quite leave you shaken, not changed by the beauty of the work or by the questions it explores. This one then is good, and given the profile of Anne Enright, will probably be described as great. You be the judge.
Filed under Book I'll Forget I Read, Booker Prize, Fiction, Prize Winner
Literary Vice 