A little life

[namechanging1]

Really enjoyed the beginning.....then it started getting too depressing....I am now about page 500....have started skimming, does it get better? It's too depressing at the moment, and I am starting not to care anymore as it all seems so helpless.
Do I carry on?

I'm reading it at the minute. Im about two thirds through and it's holding me quite well.

The one thing that irritates me is that no one seems able to say anything without using the other person's name.

It makes the dialogue quite clunky and almost winnie-the-pooh like.

'I'm sorry, piglet'.
'That's OK, pooh'.
'piglet, do you want to go to Morocco?'
'That would be wonderful Pooh.'

I'm clearly reading the wrong type of Harry Potter fanfic!

Oh, that kind of thing may not even exist any more -- my only involvement with fanfic was when I was vaguely planning to write something about it for an academic paper, and it was back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and everything was on Livejournal.

But I do remember perhaps because it was by a Big Name Fan who subsequently reinvented herself as a YA novelist a particularly grim one about Draco Malfoy being imprisoned in Azkaban awaiting the Dementor's Kiss, with Harry his only visitor, and despite Harry trying to clear his name, he eventually gets the Kiss, has his soul sucked out, and spends the rest of the fic as a walking corpse living in Harry's flat.

it is just too gratutious and unrelentlingly described. It is a novel and not a RL memoir and in the end fails to advance the plot

The abuse descriptions help us understand why Jude hates having sex with William and why he's full of self-loathing, which culminates, of course, with the tragic end. I didn't think the descriptions were as explicit as they could have been.

Finished!!

I agree, I don't think it was particularly gratuitous. There's some books where the descriptions of abuse are verging on the pornographic and I thought this was quite muted compared to some.

I'm not a cryer at books but most admit spoiler

The description of Jude's life and routine after Willem's death - the shirts, full body cushion, going through the letters... I found that really moving.

It's not without its faults... The main one being Andy's failure to do anything meaningful other than give him bollockings and have lunch with him....and to a lesser degree, the same goes for the other characters.

But a really good book nonetheless.

Well written but way too long. I stopped caring about Jude and, as others have mentioned, I found his life story entirely unbelievable. He seemed to be extremely selfish. I did finish the book but it honestly didn't stay with me in any way