Rating: ★★★★★
(SPOILER FREE)
"The axiom of equality states that x always equals x: it assumes that if you have a conceptual thing named x, that it must always be equivalent to itself, that it has a uniqueness about it..."
How is it that certain characters tug at our hearts, and certain words speak to our soul, and all of such feeling transcends the realm of fiction and reality?
Hanya Yanagihara's 'A Little Life' is an extraordinary piece of literature that redefines fiction. Her characters embody what it means to be human on a metaphysically profound level, with realities and sophistication that are wonderfully woven into existence.
Before I go on, I must note that there are various trigger warnings for this book, including but not limited to: sexual abuse, rape, pedophilia, physical and verbal abuse, kidnapping/imprisonment, rape, abuse of a disabled person, sex, drugs, self-harm. As such, it is a difficult book to recommend. Please go into it knowing that it is hard on the mind and pierces the heart.
Let me paint a brief picture, if you will: this book follows Jude, Willem, Malcolm and JB in their lives at university, to when they go off to work, and old age. It shows their pasts, their presents, their meeting of each other, and ultimately where they end up in their late lives. It shows the impact of the soul named Jude St. Francis on the three other boys, boys with lives of their own, and how they navigate through living, friendship and love.
There has only been a few moments in my life that I have truly felt the power of friendship, the depth of human relation, the profundity of the strings that tie one person to another. One of those moments was when I began to understand the dynamic between Jude, Willem, JB and Malcolm; the four musketeers (remembering there was indeed a fourth) of this tale of life. It is easy to read wishy-washy tales of best-friendships, but what makes these characters extremely real is the fragility of their relationships, is the loss of love and the anger, hatred and care towards each other. The biggest lesson to take from this book is the value of human relationships. The bonds that the characters share are so truly human; their stories so truly real; their pain so truly concrete, that it is hard to remember that they are indeed just characters.
Most readers would argue that the trauma the characters in this book are put through is unnecessary. And this is true. It is so. Yet this serves the exact purpose Yanagihara was aiming for: to show that things don't always get better. It is brutal. But it is real. It is not pretty, because life is not pretty. And just as it hurts to see these beautiful creatures experience through unimaginable suffering, it only attests that we choose to romanticize the colorful parts of life. Jude shows us that anger is valid. That it is okay to want money and know what it is like to be poor; that we can appreciate revenge as a cycle of life; that not everything has a healthy fix. That, ultimately, we come and we live and we love, and the in-betweens are raw because we are human.
As a Mathematician myself, I want to focus in on Chapter 4: The Axiom of Equality. Firstly, I love how beautifully Yanagihara interweaves Mathematics, humanities and the arts; it is a beautiful attempt at showing connectedness. We cannot exist as we are without the laws of Math just as we cannot be in society without law. We cannot grasp the concept of being human without algebra just as we cannot feel truly and fully the extent of our humanity without axiomatic proof of the abstract world.
Jude speaks of the concept of zero. And to me this is the most intriguing aspect of the Axiom of Equality. In Mathematics, we have what we call the natural numbers (N); these are all the positive whole numbers (1,2,1000,1567, etc...). It is interesting that in mathematics, it is often disputed whether or not zero is part of these natural numbers. Is nothing, zero, positive and whole? Without zero, there is no concept of nothingness. Which is impossible. With the pure fact that there exists something (the number 10, dogs, friends, planets), there also has to exist nothing (no number, no dogs, no friends, no planets). My point here is, Jude says that life is like the zero value. That it 'begins in zero and ends in zero'. With life comes living. With living comes experiences. With experiences comes growing. With growing comes death. And all of a sudden, we have come a full circle.
So when I think of what Hanya Yanagihara was trying to show in this painfully absolute depiction of human living (and death), I think a full circle. A circle that shows that there is a zero. A nothingness, at each end of a life. And there will be experiences, realities and stories to be lived in between the zeroes. That, in itself, there is a uniqueness in everything. As everything must equal to itself.
So in reality, pain is beautiful. Not in the sense of the word beauty. But in the sense of the word real. It is beautiful because Jude St. Francis shows us that, actually, life does come a full circle. It will start. And it will end.
How will you live it?
Dare disturb the universe,
N
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