A Little Life

Extraordinary Bonds

The friendships depicted in Hanya Yanagihara’s a award-winning, much feted novel A Little Life, seem almost fairytale-like. Can ordinary people love so unconditionally? Can real-life friendships be so selfless and pure?

In the book, four young roommates in college form a bond that lasts all their lives. The writer covers their journey from childhood to adulthood that includes remarkably successful careers. They are all very different in background and temperament, but something binds them tightly to each other.

Willem Ragnarsson, is the son of a Wyoming ranch hand, who works as a waiter in a posh restaurant while he waits to become an actor and soon attains stardom; Malcolm Irvine, the mixed race son of a wealthy family, becomes a celebrated architect; Jean-Baptiste (JB) Marion, is the son of Haitian immigrants, and after a few low-end jobs becomes a famous painter. However, the fulcrum around whom these lives revolve is Jude St. Francis, a lawyer and mathematician, whose past is a secret even to his friends. But he seems physically and emotionally damaged and won’t confide even the smallest problem to anyone—and he has been buried under a mountain of them.

Gradually it is revealed that Jude was dumped on a garbage can by unknown parents, and grew up in a monastery, because nobody else would have him.  As the lives of the friends unfold—parties, romances, holidays, squabbles, career paths—Yanagihara uncovers layer by layer of Jude’s past—and it is horrific.  The reader can only guess at the abuse he suffered at the monastery, but the real reasons for his physical and mental troubles comes much later, and the reader can only wonder at what inner reserves of strength Jude might have deployed to survive.

He is lucky in the way how people he meets after his monstrous childhood and adolescence give him nothing but love and care—particularly Willem, his doctor Andy, the couple Harold and Julie who adopt his as their son, and many other buddies and colleagues who gather together to pull him out of every crisis—and the thick novel (800 odd pages)— is indulgent in creating fresh traumas for Jude. So damaged is he, that he can only face his mental demons by cutting himself and hurting his body even more.

Yanagihara covers almost half a century but curiously keeps the narrative within the circle—never letting the outside in; no time markers, for instance, or indicators of what is happening in the world around them.

As Jude suffering increases, as well as the disruptions in his friends’ lives, the novel abandons its optimistic tone and plunges into darkness, cruelty, and unbearable despair, that even overwhelming love cannot quite obliterate.

The first real indication of Jude state of mind comes when he wakes his flatmate Willem, saying, “There’s been an accident, Willem; I’m sorry.” Jude arm is wrapped in a blood-soaked towel. He refuses to go to a hospital, asking to be taken to Andy instead. Willem with his natural reserve, has been detached from Jude’s emotional turmoil, and is shocked when Andy, after stitching up and bandaging Jude tells him, “You know he cuts himself, don’t you?”

Jude believes he is ugly, deformed and disgusting—though others describe him as handsome—for him self-mutilation is his escape route. Interspersed with his anguish are sections of amazing tenderness, humour, sparkling conversations; also demonstrations of love that are sometimes harder to bear than Jude’s pain, because of what the one who offers that love is willing to sacrifice.

That’s why, in spite of its gloomy undertones, some harrowing passages of sexual abuse, and overdose of hysterical melodrama, A Little Life is a profoundly optimistic and life-affirming book. And one that puts friendship on an impossibly high pedestal.

A Little Life

By Hanya Yanagihara

Publisher: Anchor

Pages: 832

So You Don't Get Lost in the Neighbourhood

Memories Of Another Day

Finally lay hands on last year’s Nobel Prize winner, Patrick Modiano’s So You Don't Get Lost in the Neighbourhood (translated by Euan Cameron)—the latest of his 30 odd concise and introspective novels most of them set in post World War II France. The celebrated French author’s work had not been translated much into English before he won the Nobel (just one of his long list of awards) and was called by a section of the media, a bestselling author nobody had read. 

Along with a recent edition of The Occupation Trilogy, this novel and a translation of his 2005 memoir of childhood called Pedigree, helped the English-speaking world discover the mysterious French author.  So You Don't Get Lost in the Neighbourhood is about a solitary writer named Jean Daragane. He seems to have no friends and a dull daily routine that is rudely disrupted when he receives a phone call from a man who claims to have found his address book. The man, Gilles Ottolini, turns out to be a bit sinister and wants to know about a name—Guy Torstel-- listed in the diary, for which he also enlists the help of an enigmatic young woman, Chantal Grippay.

The name that Daragane can’t even remember, nevertheless forces him to recall a past he has striven to forget, when, as a child, he was abandoned by his parents and lived with a dancer and courtesan called Annie Astrand, in the Paris suburbs. Ottolini points out that the name was mentioned in his first book, which Daragne can’t remember either, so long ago was it. However, a connection is proved and Daragne is forced go into flashback.

Bit by bit, flashes of memory reveal a murder, an escape, lots of subterfuge and the darkness of collaboration with the Germans during the occupation of France during the War. A lot is left unsaid for the reader to guess at between the lines.

This book is more atmosphere than plot—a sense of foreboding wrapped in its pages right from the harsh phone ring that disrupts the calm of the protagonist’s life; then it’s clear that there was a lot churning his mind all the time, the dark memories that continue to haunt him and make him the man he is. Ottolini is just the catalyst for Darange to confront his past.

Modiano keeps returning to the period of the Nazi occupation, and his memoir gives a hint of why—like Daragne’s past is an echo of Modiano’s own. The dubious businesses his father conducted during the War (he writes about this dispassionately in Pedigree) and the unsavoury company he kept seems to given Modiano a lot to write about in his novels.

The genre of this book would be noted as ‘suspense’ but the subtlety of his style does not make it a thriller in the accepted sense of the word.

So You Don’t Get Lost In The Neighborhood

by Patrick Modiano

(Translated by Euan Cameron)

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin

Pages: 160

The Story Of The Lost Child

A Sprawling Epic

The Story Of The Lost Child is the fourth and final book in Elena Ferrante’s sprawling, complicated Neapolitan quartet (translated by Ann Goldstein). Those who haven’t read the earlier three--My Brilliant Friend (2012), The Story of a New Name (2013) and Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (2014) would find it a bit difficult to pick up the threads of the many criss-crossing stories, even though the author provides a detailed cast of characters – the various families and their connections.

A bit about Elena Ferrante—the most famous writer of Italian bestsellers writes under an assumed name and her identity has been a closely guarded secret ever since she first began to publish in 1992.  From her books it can be assumed that she is a native of Naples, and that the book may have some autobiographical elements.

The narrator of The Story Of The Lost Child is also a writer called Elena Greco, who grew up in a place just referred to as “the neighbourhood” but from her descriptions it is clear that it is slum, full of crime, poverty, and thwarted ambition, ruled by the Solaras family.  Woven into the soap opera of the friendship between Elena and Lina, is an overview of Italian politics, the social and economic upheaveals in the country, and of course, organized crime—the Italians did ‘invent’ the Mafia.

In this book, Elena is facing the aftermath of leaving her husband Pietro and abandoning her daughters, Dede and Elisa, for the sake of the handsome and rich Nino, who was once Lina’s lover.  The situation is rather civilized, Pietro’s mother Adele looks after the kids as Elena traipses around on work related trips, and the estranged couple continue to live under the same roof.

Her friend Lila, on the other hand, never stepped out of Naples and the “neighbourhood” but is an entrepreneur, an early mover in the field of computers. She has also left her husband and is living with the kindly Enzo and her son Gennaro by her first husband.  

When Elena hits a low patch in her career and her relationship with Nino, she moves back into the neighbourhood, that she worked so hard to escape from, using her education as a springboard. She gets an apartment just above Lila’s, this proximity to her past helps her writing and she is soon on the road to success, even as she seems to fail as a daughter and a mother.  Even though Ferrante writes with understanding and empathy about the position of women in Italian society, she still can’t help judge Elena for choosing a career over family. The turmoil her daughters are put through and how they turn out because of it, points to Elena’s neglect of them. The fathers are just bystanders who, like Pietro, are providers, or like Nino distant and glamorous, occasional visitors and bearers of gifts.

Lila takes on the responsibility of Elena’s daughters, as she travels and chases fame.  Both Elena and Lila find themselves pregnant at the same time and give birth to daughters Imma and Tina. It is Lila’s tragedy that is at the core of this book, and around it, life in the teeming neighbourhood goes on; men and women slog, fight, marry, divorce, have children, fall ill, die, rebuild their lives after a devastating earthquake. The sexual revolution takes place, a gay man comes out of the closet and entitled men like Nino hold the reins of the country.

At one level there is so much happening in the book, and at another Elena and Lila’s domestic dramas play out in mundane detail. Ferrante writes in a breathless style that hurls the reader from one episode to another without pause to reflect.  Reading the three earlier books (the many references to Ischia, for instance are from the second book) before picking up this one is recommended, though not mandatory.

The Story Of The Lost Child

By Elena Ferrante

Translated by Ann Goldstein

Published by: Europa

Pages: 473

The Vegetarian

Food For Thought

Winner of the 2016 Man Booker International Prize, Han Kang’s The Vegetarian is a slim novella (translated by Deborah Smith) uses the simple story of a woman’s change in food preferences to portray gender realities in the author’s native Korea. Like in India and many Asian countries, the women is treated as a second class citizen, who cannot make her own choices even in a matter as basic as what she would like to eat.  In India, where a large section of the population is vegetarian, the hullabaloo over a women refusing to eat meat would seem excessive, but Yeong-hye wilfully destroys her life by her stubbornness.  In her slow descent to mental regression and physical annihilation, she seems to protest an existence not of her own choosing.

At the beginning of the book, her husband Cheong remarks on his own ordinariness, his wife being “completely unremarkable in every way,”  their life together routine and uneventful. He goes to office, she keeps house and does some work on her own, the only strange things about her being her detached attitude, and her inability to wear a bra—the latter embarrasses Cheong no end.

Then one night, he wakes up to find his wife throwing away all the meat in the refrigerator and says that henceforth she will neither eat it or cook it for her husband. The only explanation she is willing to give is, “I had a dream.”

  

The result of  Yeong-hye’s resolve causes an inordinate amount of tumult in her own family—to whom her husband complains of his wife’s weirdness and disobedience. Her father tries to force feed her a piece of pork, which results in Yeong-hye slashing herself.  This violent episode takes place at the home of her sister In-hye and her husband. After his Cheong leaves her, and she moves into a tiny place of her own.

She is able to cope with her condition, but those around her cannot seem to accept her fragile independence. In the second of the three parts of the book, her brother-in-law, an aspiring artist, develops a passion for Yeong-hye, that ends his marriage and destroys his life.  Now In-hye is left to rebuild her life and to look after her sister who looks like she is slowly dissolving into herself.

 Even if very little of it is portrayed, there is physical and emotional violence in the most mundane of situations, and a woman like Yeong-hye who does not want to live by set rules has no place in society. Even though the reader feels empathy for Yeong-hye, after a point the repetitiveness of the suffering she inflicts on herself and those who care for her is tedious.

  

The reasons for Yeong-hye’s self-flagellating behaviour can only be guessed at from her brief internal monologues, like “Can only trust my breasts now. I like my breasts; nothing can be killed by them. Hand, foot, tongue, gaze, all weapons from which nothing is safe,” or “Why am I changing like this? Why are all my edges sharpening — what am I going to gouge?”

 Originally published in South Korea in 2007,  and also turned into a feature film (the scenes of painting on naked body has the kind of sensuousness that the camera can capture); it took the efforts of her translator Deborah Smith to being this book to the English readership. The power of the woman’s character, in a culture where women are usually unable to make their own choices does fascinate and horrify the reader in equal measure, even though her choice is to torment her own mind and body.

The Vegetarian

By Han Kang

Translated by Deborah Smith

Published by Hogarth

Pages: 188

The Lie Tree

A Brave Girl

Frances Hardinge’s Costa Award-winning novel, The Lie Tree is set in the 19th century, when women were not treated as the intellectual equal of men. Faith, the courageous heroine of the novel, is a fourteen-year-old who bristles every time she is talked down to as silly little girl.

She is the daughter of Reverend Sunderly, a natural scientist, who leaves England under a cloud of disgrace, accused of having lied about some important fossil finds. His family—sly and shallow wife Myrtle, son Howard, brother-in-law Miles and Faith --make the journey to a place called Vane, where an excavation is on. Faith wants to be a natural scientist like her father, but is told by him, “A girl cannot be brave, or clever, or skilled as a boy can.” And her coquettish mother tells her,  “Women find themselves on battlefields just as men do. We are given no weapons, and cannot be seen to fight. But fight we must, or perish.”

 The family is treated shoddily in the small, gossipy, class conscious and mean-spirited town, but when the Reverend is found dead, Faith has to chase the truth. In a harrowing scene, the townsfolk refuse to bury her father, because he allegedly committed suicide and cannot be buried on consecrated ground.  Only Faith suspects he was murdered, but who would believe a girl, unless she can produce proof. And everything that happens to the family is somehow connected to a plant her father concealed before he died.

In spite of the multi-layered and uncomfortable ‘ladylike’ garments of the time, Faith runs, rows and climbs about like a man, and proves that restrictive social convention cannot stop a girl with brains and courage. A book that would inspire and entertain young readers as well as adults.

The Lie Tree

By Francis Hardinge

Published by: Macmillan

Pages: 416

Submission

Changing Times

It’s surprising that French author Michel Houellebecq wrote a novel like Submission in these communally fraught times. According to reports, a little after the French original was released, the attack on the office of Charlie Hedbo took place, that resulted in the murder of twelve people. Laurent Joffrin, editor of Libération, wrote that Submission “will mark the date in history when the ideas of the far right made a grand return to serious French literature,” and armed guards were placed at the offices of Houellebecq’s publishers.

Submission is set in 2022, and seen through the eyes of forty-four year old François, a lecturer at the New Sorbonne University and an expert on nineteenth-century author J. K. Huysmans. Francois is bored with his solitary, aimless life of routine teaching and casual seductions.

It’s election season and the political grapevine issues dire warnings. The Jewish parents of his current lover, furtively move to Israel. Then, much to the shock of the French liberal intellectuals, in an alliance with the Socialists, an Islamic party sweeps to power, with the seemingly moderate Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohammed Ben Abbes, taking over reins of the country. Islamic law comes into force, women are veiled and pushed out of the job market. Polygamy is encouraged and generous inducements – money and multiple wives—offered to academics who convert to Islam.

The novel is both satirical and cautionary, targeting with sharp barbs both the politically naïve French natives as well as a Muslim leader with ambitions of creating a unified Europe to include Islamic countries like Morocco, Turkey and Tunisia and later Lebanon and Egypt.  Francois, with his physical ailments and religious confusion, is just a pathetic gnat amidst this huge historical upheaval.

The book could be a contender for the bad sex award, but otherwise it an absorbing and discomfiting read. Mainly because it could prove to be prophetic.

Submission

By Michel Houellebecq

(Translated from the French by Lorin Stein)

Published by William Heinemann

Pages: 320

The Nest

Black Sheep Saga

There is something universal about The Nest, Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney’s debut novel about siblings at war.  It can be assumed with a great degree of accuracy, that where money is involved, people anywhere in the world will behave exactly in the same way; unless there are saintly, which the Plumbs are not.

When the book opens, a drunk and stoned Leo Plumb seduces a young Hispanic waitress Matilda Rodriguez with promises of promoting her music career. The car they are making out in, meets with an accident, Leo is badly hurt, and the girl loses a foot. Leo’s mother Francie, pays a huge sum to cover Matilda’s treatment, silence the Rodriguez family and save the Plumb name from being blackened. Trouble is the money she uses is the trust fund of the Plumb siblings, which, according to her husband’s will, is meant to be given to them when he youngest, Melody, turns forty.

Leonard Plumb senior was a self made millionaire and assumed his kids would be successful too. However, it turns out that all of them are in financial trouble and have been hoping that the nest egg, which is referred to by them as The Nest, will bail them out.

Jack, who runs a business in antiques, is almost bankrupt and has kept the business afloat by borrowing against property, he and his partner, Walker, own. Bea works with a small literary journal run by the idealistic Paul, but it barely pays enough; Melody needs money for her twin daughters’ college fee, or she and her husband Walt will have to sell their home. They are all shocked to find The Nest depleted to save the skin of the black sheep Leo, whose shenanigans leave him with an expensive divorce to deal with and an unemployable status.

With sympathy and humour, D’Aprix Sweeney, follows the lives of the Plumb family and those who love or are loved by them. Homeless and broke Leo crashes with a former girlfriend, Stephanie, and hopes to rebuild his life, even though he has an escape route planned. One of Melody’s daughters, Nora, finds herself attracted to a girl called Simone. The homosexuality of Jack and Nora is portrayed without any drama. The Plumb family is progressive that way, even though they are walking through financial and romantic minefields.

A shadow of 9/11 falls over the Matilda part of the story, which is an interesting though not crucial subplot.

D’Aprix Sweeney stays away from dark humour that tends to come easily when dysfunctional families are involved, she never judges her characters, not even the feckless Leo. If he weren’t such a wrecking  ball for everyone he comes in contact with, he would have been a source of entertainment for the family—everyone has one charming relative who never grows up.

The Nest

By Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney

Publisher: Ecco

Pages: 353