Hanya Yanagihara

While it’s not unusual for a book to make me cry, it is a little out of the norm for me to burst into tears when talking about a book—which is exactly what happened when I tried to explain this maudlin plot to my husband. This book should come with a warning: it’s melancholic and hard to read in places—everything horrible in a piteous life happens here. It’s Shakespearean tragic. But, it’s also one of the most beautiful stories of friendship I’ve ever read: real and reverent, forgiving and sacrificial, loyal and loving.

This is a decades-long, panoramic friendship saga of four college friends: JB, an indulgent, insecure, self-involved but, also, lovable artist; Willem, a charming, good-looking actor who’s fiercely protective and loyal; Malcolm, an architect who craves propriety and struggles with guilt and indecision; and Jude, an intensely private and serious litigator with an obscure, traumatic past. The story follows these friends passionately pursuing their dreams after college in NYC with the peaks and valleys of their friendship as the focal point of this narrative. While they see themselves as a unit, it’s really Jude at the center of it all, as the sun they all orbit around. However, Jude sees himself only as “an extravagant collection of problems,” even though everyone around him, everyone who gets pulled in as if by centripetal force, deeply desires to help him move past the extreme trauma of a childhood that has scarred him both physically and emotionally (392).

In this story of friendship and, ultimately, of love, it asks the question of whether or not love is enough to save someone—whether or not that person thinks they’re worthy of being saved. If my previous warnings of trauma don’t scare you off, I highly recommend this lit-fic read. Other than being a little too long and having too many terrible things happen to these characters—some more than others, some of Job-like proportions, moving it from reality to something more mythic, too incredulous to believe—it really is a beautiful story of friendship and love that’s worth all 720 pages, a 4.5 star read.… (mais)