The dystopian future depicted in the final section is horrific indeed. It loses steam in the Hawaii section and only fitfully regains momentum until its gripping end.

But 700-page books will sag in places, and this one is no exception. In its evocation of eternal recurrence and the illusory nature of life, To Paradise recalls Buddhist ideas and so large a wisdom that it may seem absurdly worldly to critique the novel as a piece of craft. Limited and circumstantial as they may ultimately be, acts of love and goodness do leaven this book, which is finally as much concerned with the vulnerable as the inescapable. If in a Russian novel one struggles to keep track of who is related to whom, here we struggle to keep track of who has turned into whom, especially as Yanagihara masterfully repurposes themes, situations and motifs as well.

There are dozens of other such reincarnations, and they simultaneously bedazzle and befuddle. Strikingly, ushers her characters offstage only to bring them back, in other eras and other guises, multiple times. With breathtaking audacity Yanagihara rewrites America, the Civil War having produced, in this account, not a united country but a conglomeration of territories. And behind this impressive, significant novel stands the question: what is a life, if it is not lived in freedom? Read Full Review >ĭeftly paced and judiciously detailed, the tale makes hay with the conventions of the 19th-century novel. In many ways – not least the questions of political and social responsibility it poses, especially in the face of global catastrophe – it is a darker work, and yet a more fruitfully puzzling, multifaceted one. Where the suffering and hopelessness of A Little Life created an overwhelming experience that left readers divided around the issue of how much they could take, this is a far subtler delineation of those who feel hamstrung, beleaguered, inadequate to the task ahead. The novel’s title invokes a feeling of expectant adventuring, of happiness waiting somewhere what, perhaps, nation-builders might feel just as strongly as individuals at the beginning of their lives. In some ways, this is a work whose fascination with entropy – the breakdown of societies, of property, of the body – makes its job almost impossibly hard we feel as though we are standing in the centre of ever-decreasing circles. each section conjures a vivid, often startlingly reconfigured America. There are few surface resemblances between A Little Life, Yanagihara’s Booker-shortlisted second novel, and To Paradise, but in both she is deeply, compulsively interested in characters for whom the world seems unattainable, whose histories and temperaments coalesce to render them marginal, held back. intricately assembled themes and intensely anxious preoccupations.

To paradise hanya review