7/8/2023 0 Comments A little life description![]() ![]() The flaws, to get them out of the way first, are numerous but somehow not sufficient to completely derail this current favorite for the Booker Prize. Nevertheless, the question of what exactly we are left with except the voyeuristic and rather ghoulish intrusion into the misery of one of modern literature’s most unfortunate characters is not easily answered. ![]() ![]() The ecstatic response to Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life meant I was excited from the moment an email arrived to tell me it had arrived for collection from my local bookshop until I was presented with a 720-page hardback monster weighing more than our family dog. At least this bombshell put me in mind of a most amusing Kingsley Amis review in which he commented that handling a similarly proportioned behemoth “so that it will lie open on desk or lap is impossible to one of normal muscular power. This might matter less if closing it on purpose were not such a constantly attractive option.” No such worries for A Little Life, which is overly ambitious, significantly overlong, at times irritating and unintentionally self-satirising, profoundly unfunny even when it tries to be the opposite - and at times almost hypnotically readable, relentlessly harrowing, and compelling in the extreme. ![]()
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