Can we talk about A Little Life? ( with spoilers)

@bookworm14 - yes that was another gripe, apart from the relentless misery porn, and the unlikeliness of someone so very abused and disadvantaged becoming so successful, there was no sense of the historical period it was set in. Ugh.

I didn’t particularly like the book by the end I was thinking ffs what now. I did cry a few times and I did and still do have very vivid picturing of the characters and the settings. It was a relief to finish the book.

I didn’t enjoy The Goldfinch either I felt similar long drawn out and lots of waffling.

Both seem to be marmite books a friend is baffled that I like neither (when there are so many other books we both love)

Totally gripped when I read it, although some parts I practically read with my hand over my eyes, the words were so horrifying. Recommended it to everyone. Then I read it again and the scales fell somewhat... I found it to be a bit of a checklist of horrors and found it the level of brutality to be quite unnecessary.
Having said that, the first time reading it was a wow experience and that is a rarity.
(Only had it with The Secret History and to a lesser extent with Circe.)

I didn’t love it. Too much misery.

It also fails as both a ‘fable’ and a realistic novel. It’s too realistic to be a fable but fails utterly to create a believable sense of time or place. How can you set a novel in New York in (presumably) the 80s to the 00s without any mention of the AIDS crisis, 9/11 or the financial crash?

For a much better take on a similar theme (group of young gay men and their friends negotiate work and relationships) try The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai. It will make you cry though!

Oh I'm not reading the posts yet but marking as just started it this morning and would love to talk about it. Cant put it down so far.

Ghastly overlong torture porn with a teenage girl’s fetishised attitude to gay men. I’m baffled by its popularity.

I listened as an audio book and LOVED it. It stayed with me for a long time too and I sobbed through the last half hour!

Where is everyone getting the idea that it’s a ‘fable’? It’s a realist novel about a group of friends in a realistically described (if economically privileged) New York, that keeps the reader reading on because of the continual piling on of more miseries on its main character and the (ethically dubious) promise of the horrible details of Jude’s sexual abuse being held out till two thirds of the way through the novel.

I imagine it primarily appeals to people who like ‘true crime’ full of graphic details of rape and murder, and misery memoirs.

Agree with Lampan.At first I couldn't stop reading it, very compelling but then as more misery was heaped upon misery and all the self harming just being described more and more I just hated it. I'd invested so much time in it that I wanted to finish it but kind of dreaded reading it, total misery porn and unbelievable (everyone super successful etc.) I wish I could unread it.

I lent mine to a friend and she hasn’t given it back. I feel bereft! I need the characters back in my house 😂

I disliked it. It’s very compelling, I read it in 3 days, but as it went on it just (in my opinion) became OTT. Just one awful event after another. It made me wonder why someone would write a book like that. I lent it to my friend and she loved it though so I think it’s just a very polarising book!

I love this book, and since first reading it several years ago, I re-read it every year.

I find the writing beautiful and nuanced, her descriptions of intimacy, love and grief really reflect my own feelings and sound true for me.

Of course I would hate for all those bad things to happen to anyone, never mind to a single person. But it also seems horribly plausible that a child groomed from an early age could be abused like Jude. His struggle to live a "normal" life subsequently is both tragic and heroic - in as much as it's a struggle for anyone who has lived through grief or loss, to continue in their life. These themes are expressed really eloquently for me. I've never cried so hard when reading a book.

I read her first book and found it far less interesting, so I'm doubly impressed that she's come so far just in her second novel. The disappointment comes when not finding anything else as good as this afterwards.

Oh, come on, it read like an incredibly long Hurt/Comfort fanfic without the comfort. Self-harming, in continual physical pain, disabled, beautiful, brilliant man who bakes when he’s not harming himself, reeling from childhood sexual abuse — not enough for you? Give him a vicious boyfriend who rapes him and throws him down the stairs? Still not enough? Let’s have an extended flashback to every salacious detail of his abuse and child prostitution? Still not enough? Let’s give him, finally, a loving relationship, and then suddenly kill off his boyfriend? And then he commits suicide.

What are your thoughts about the fact that Willem’s last thoughts were for Hemming rather than Jude? (Sob)

I have such mixed feelings about it. I really really enjoyed reading it, I was dying to get back to it every evening, and for such a long book it never palled on me. But I did feel like the heaping of misery upon misery was just trying to emotionally manipulate the reader. It didn’t seem believable that literally every adult Jude interacted with as a boy would be a child rapist. And I didn’t buy Willem’s ‘turning’ and their subsequent relationship.

It’s crass misery porn.