Literature without contemplation or squeamishness. To address the prose of yanagihara one has to know, as the wise man would say, that nothing human is alien to us, no matter how much it disturbs us. Sometimes discomfort is necessary both emotionally and intellectually to return to that open plane of the most anthropological vision.
The lukewarmness, the mediocrity, the normality... All of this distances us from what we most truly are. The human being is also violence, not necessarily truculence, it is also deep restlessness for survival and terror of the darkness that always stalks the world from that unknown cosmos.
And Yanagihara will have his fears but he writes without fear, drilling until he reaches the fiber that connects everything, that links us all in the peremptory feeling of existence. Appearance is essential in the author's final intention. Because we start from easily recognizable places, environments and characters with which we can see ourselves reflected. Until little by little everything is on track for misty paths of destiny.
Top 3 recommended novels by Hanya Yanagihara
So little life
An intense and winding journey of 1.000 pages. A masterful thread of the passage of time peering into some fascinating characters.
To discover ... What men say and what are silent. Where does the blame come from and where does it go? How much sex matters. Who can we call friend. And finally ... What is the price of life and when does it stop having value?
To discover that and more, here it is So little life, a story that covers more than three decades of friendship in the lives of four men who grow up together in Manhattan. Four men who have to survive failure and success and who, over the years, learn to overcome economic, social and emotional crises. Four men who share a very peculiar idea of ​​intimacy, a way of being together made of few words and many gestures. Four men whose relationship the author uses to make a thorough investigation of the limits of human nature.
So Little Life has become a veritable literary phenomenon, an unprecedented success on social media that has been unanimously acclaimed by critics and readers. Hanya Yanagihara, its author, has been compared to Jonathan Franzen and Donna Tartt for her ability to masterfully describe the psychology of complex characters and find answers to universal questions along the way. A new young literary voice that is here to stay.
To Paradise
The uchronic has a lot of utopias that should have been. With that melancholic point of involution that has every consideration looking back at the concatenation of human errors. Vanities and ambitions always misguided.
The question in this novel is to decipher, from similar locations that remain in the face of the resounding passing of our civilization, what good can remain of the human concept. The caveat is always the intrahistorical. What reconciles us is always the notion that love could have been the solution in each moment between past, present, future or any other space-time plane that one wanted to stage...
In an alternate version of 1893 America, New York is part of the Free States, where gay marriage is permitted. A boy from a distinguished family is torn between marrying a suitor chosen by his grandfather or choosing a music teacher with few resources with whom he is in love.
In a 1993 Manhattan besieged by "the disease," a young Hawaiian lives with his partner, whose age and income far exceeds his, and hides his troubled childhood and the fate of his father from her.
And in 2093, in a world ravaged by plagues and ruled by a totalitarian state, a powerful scientist and his family try to find the necessary strategies to survive without losing each other along the way.
As in a fascinating and ingenious symphony, these three parts make up a monumental, historical and dystopian novel in which love seems impossible and, however, the protagonists, with their limitations and secrets, are obstinate in looking for it as the only way to reach the end. paradise.
The people in the trees
The first novel that gained in repercussion after the great success of "So Little Life."
In 1950, Norton Perina, a young doctor recently graduated, joins an expedition to a remote Micronesian island, Ivu'ivu, in search of a mysterious tribe. There he begins to investigate what will lead him to win the Nobel Prize: the strange longevity of the islanders. Before returning to the United States, he decides to adopt forty native children to rescue them from poverty. But in 1995, one of his sons denounced him for abuse ...
While serving his sentence, Perina, at the urging of her faithful colleague Ronald Kubodera, writes her memoirs in order to regain lost prestige and prove her innocence. An intriguing story about ambition and human nature in the voice of a suspicious storyteller who, like Humbert Humbert, challenges our sense of ethics.
