![]() ![]() One day I saw a guy smoking in the courtyard of a small shopping center. They morph, and they turn, and sometimes they turn on you. I know that memories do more than just seep out. Occasionally, when I was feeling especially rebellious, I'd bum cigarettes from strangers. Others, I'd sneak a movie, hoping Grandma wouldn't ask where I'd been, because she'd remind me films were "of the devil." (Why couldn't I be quiet when she asked that? Why didn't I just invoke my teenager status and not answer? I don't know.) Some afternoons, I'd spend hours nesting amid the stacks of its used bookstores. We were living in Miami then, for my dad's job, but when school let out I'd return to my native California to stay with my grandparents in Berkeley. I most regret being quiet and not crying the summer I turned 15. "Well," he said, "obviously Jeff can't do it." I am quiet and don't cry when the brothers of one of my dearest friends joke that I eat dog, as they have every time they've seen me for more than 15 years. I was quiet and didn't cry when an HR guy outed me to colleagues while recruiting donors for an office blood drive. So: I was quiet and didn't cry when Mac, my fifth-grade bully, repeatedly mocked my slitty eyes and my coarse hair and told others that if they spent time with me, they'd get eyes and hair like that too. ![]() And I heard it in her admonitions whenever she sensed my oncoming tears. But I also felt it in her tense silence whenever arguments erupted in our family. Mostly I saw it in Grandma's behavioral quirks - the milk jugs of pennies banked under the bathroom sink, just in case $20 bills at the bottom of her yarn box, just in case the molding food in the fridge that she couldn't throw away, just in case. My grandparents survived, but not without cost. More than 10 million Chinese civilians were killed during the war. During those refugee years, my grandmother gave birth to three more children. She also had to care for about 20 of my grandfather's students, who accompanied them. As the Japanese army swept through China in the early 1940s, she, my seminary professor grandfather, and their two young kids sprinted ahead of the soldiers. Who was I to argue? I was reared on stories of her suffering. When I was 4, 5, 6, I was a crier, so she repeated this lesson over and over and over. This was the only thing that she, a retired Bible teacher, ever said to me in her corrective, classroom voice. My grandmother, whom I loved more than anyone in the world, would whisper-shout this to me in Cantonese when I was a kid. When I read that passage, I thought: I know that feeling. "For many years," Yanagihara writes, Jude "had envisioned (unimaginatively) a vault, and at the end of the day, he would gather the images and sequences and words that he didn't want to think about again and open the heavy steel door only enough to hurry them inside, closing it quickly and tightly." But no book I've read has captured as perfectly the inner life of someone hoarding the unwanted souvenirs of early trauma - the silence, the self-loathing, the chronic and aching pain. Some reviewers have questioned how realistic Yanagihara's depictions of the abuse and its aftereffects could be. It seems at first extensive, then almost endless. ![]() Jude suffers childhood abuse, the details of which Yanagihara slowly reveals via flashback. But I would never recommend it to anyone. Indeed, A Little Life may be the most beautiful, profoundly moving novel I've ever read. It's particularly dazzling when she visits the complicated mind and spirit of Jude, who becomes the axis on which the book's world turns. It was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize (it lost to Marlon James's A Brief History of Seven Killings) and has been longlisted for the National Book Award for fiction. Yanagihara's prose is occasionally so stunning that it would stop me, pushing me back to the beginning of a paragraph for a second read. I'd give A Little Life all of the awards. I read 164 books in 2015 and tracked them all in a spreadsheet. ![]()
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