This has spoilers.
I remember watching Pink Floyd’s The Wall for the first time. At home (waaay back when I still lived with family) on the TV alone late at night. I remember feeling something like nausea, of a sort I hadn’t before, but loving it. I was both in love with this music/visual thing and repulsed by it in a captivating way… this depiction of physical and emotional war so visceral I felt it for days after. I found (some) pieces of art I ‘liked’ more since then, but none that affected me so strongly in such a specifically intended way, pulling me into the good and bad of its depictions with such force.
A Little Life is that experience, drawn out over 800 odd pages.
It is the single most gruelling, emotional and personal piece of art I have seen. It is uncompromising and unflinching in a way that genuinely becomes uncomfortable. It is the most heartbreaking story I have watched, heard or read. It is also, for me personally, one of the most cathartic… and I do not believe it could have been that without being everything else it is.
A Little Life begins as a story about 4 young friends in America, their dreams, and their reality. It stays about that a VERY short time. This is quickly a story, before you can see the magic trick happening, about one man, with an unimaginably, incomprehensibly awful past. And his friends who try to make him see himself as worthwhile. Some succeed. Some fail.
And It’s not enough. Occasionally it gives some light, but you always know he is on borrowed time. He lives to an older man, but commits suicide on the second attempt.
Weeks after finishing this book I don’t know if I should see it as being about Jude and the depths of his struggle to see himself as worthy of life, or as being about the people around him, and their grief in both his life and death.
The first is sad. The second is still heartbreaking.
But the second, where I suspect the truth of this book lies, at least for me, is also utterly wonderful. Because even when it is futile and harrowing and infuriating, loving someone on their own terms can change whatever remains of their life. And once it’s over, those who did will have an experience bittersweet, but beautiful.
Fuck this book.
I love this book.
Luke Holmes, On The Page
Luke Holmes’ series takes a dip into what has inspired him. “It is not review writing. No effort is being made to be objective or balanced. All reactions are my own hot-takes, and are subject to my personal tastes and how I feel about the book at the time”.
