Home with a stomach bug last week, I was able to catch up on some of my stacks of reading. Still trying to decide whether to have a go at what sounds a very difficult book. One of those books that hurts but stays with you, that shifts your perspective, maybe just a notch on the sundial but so the light nonetheless looks different and the shadows shift. Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life.
Such difficult, possibly transformative books are not to be undertaken lightly…like in my last post where I wrote of the fellow tribesman who knows when and when not to say the things, often destabilizing, that may sting or worse: Especially for us no-skin types, one chooses with care and awareness the moment for reading something that can throw open doors to dark places.
From Jon Michaud’s review in The New Yorker:
“God whispers to us in our pleasures … but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world,” C. S. Lewis wrote, in “The Problem of Pain.” In “A Little Life,” pain is not a message from God, or a path to enlightenment, and yet Yanigihara listens to it anyway.
God shouts in our pains. And we’d best listen. Yes. I had a doctor’s appointment the other day, and this doctor is wise and very Christian. She is Puerto Rican as well, a further mark in her favor. We were discussing bits of my life, and when she said “You know God doesn’t give us more than we can bear–” I burst out laughing. I knew from her intonation that more was coming, and that she would never toss that single line at me as some ridiculous consolation, but the laugh came involuntarily.
Bedtime read is The Outlander now– lent by a friend for a good escapist read– though am thinking I may watch the series rather than plow through the book. There’s a scene where Claire, transported to 18th c. Scotland, is cleaning hunky Jamie’s shoulder wound, and she had to dig down quite a bit, all the while conversing for distraction, to be sure it was clean enough.
Aren’t our psychic and spiritual wounds the same– we can bandage them up for so long, and seek distraction from the pain, but they’ll continue to fester. Maybe we can live with them that way, but maybe the digging, awful as it is, is the only thing to do. But get in, get out, bring the iodine and get the damn thing done, because who the hell wants to linger in a wound. Isn’t that what drawn-out psychoanalysis is?
A Little Life‘s Jude practices law and is also a mathematician; Michaud writes that in a sense he replaces religion and its possibility of absolutes with math. Having loved a mathematician and raised another– yes, loved two–this is all the more intriguing to me. As a student I loved math, especially geometry: the combination of numbers, words, drawing and spatial concepts felt so right. But as a girl it seemed off limits somehow and I set it aside. Living in close proximity to it over the years– its beauty, the deep satisfaction it can provide beyond the solving of a problem, the surprising applications– has been a window to another world. Mandelbrot and his fractals are a personal beacon.
It sounds like there is no redemption in A Little Life, but there may be some truths, and beauty. Like, many a life.