Tan poca vida / A Little Life (Spanish Edition)
BESTSELLER DEL NEW YORK TIMES • FINALISTA DEL NATIONAL BOOK AWARD • FINALISTA DEL MAN BOOKER PRIZE • GANADOR DEL KIRKUS PRIZE • UNA SENSACIÓN VIRAL EN BOOKTOK
Una novela que sigue el hilo de la gran literatura norteamericana y que ha llegado para dar un nuevo sentido al silencio y un nuevo valor a las emociones.
La novela que hay que leer. Para descubrir... Qué dicen y qué callan los hombres. De dónde viene y dónde va la culpa. Cuánto importa el sexo. A quien podemos llamar amigo. Y finalmente... Qué precio tiene la vida y cuándo deja de tener valor.
Para descubrir eso y más, aquí está Tan poca vida, una historia que recorre más de tres décadas de amistad en la vida de cuatro hombres que crecen juntos en Manhattan. Cuatro hombres que tienen que sobrevivir al fracaso y al éxito y que, a lo largo de los años, aprenden a sobreponerse a las crisis económicas, sociales y emocionales. Cuatro hombres que comparten una idea muy peculiar de la intimidad, una manera de estar juntos hecha de pocas palabras y muchos gestos. Cuatro hombres cuya relación la autora utiliza para realizar una minuciosa indagación de los límites de la naturaleza humana.
Tan poca vida se ha convertido en un auténtico fenómeno literario, un éxito sin precedentes en las redes sociales que ha sido unánimemente aclamado por la crítica y los lectores. Hanya Yanagihara, su autora, ha sido comparada con Jonathan Franzen y Donna Tartt por su capacidad para describir con maestría la psicología de personajes complejos y hallar en el camino respuesta a cuestiones universales. Una nueva y joven voz literaria que ha llegado para quedarse.
Mejor novela del año según The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Vanity Fair, Vogue, The Guardian, The Economist, Newsweek, People, Time Out New York, Huffington Post, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Review, entre otras.
ENGLISH DESCRIPTION
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR, according to:
The New York Times•; The Washington Post•; The Wall Street Journal•; NPR•; Vanity Fair•; Vogue•; Minneapolis Star Tribune•; St. Louis Post-Dispatch•; The Guardian•;O, The Oprah Magazine•; Slate•; Newsday•; Buzzfeed•; The Economist•; Newsweek•;People•; Kansas City Star•; Shelf Awareness•; Time Out New York•; Huffington Post•; Book Riot•; Refinery29•; Bookpage•; Publishers Weekly•; Kirkus Review
WINNER OF THE KIRKUS PRIZE
A MAN BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST
A NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST
A VIRAL SENSATION ON BOOKTOK
Brace yourself for the most astonishing, challenging, upsetting, and profoundly moving book in many a season. An epic about love and friendship in the twenty-first century that goes into some of the darkest places fiction has ever traveled and yet somehow improbably breaks through into the light. Truly an amazement—and a great gift for its readers.
When four classmates from a small Massachusetts college move to New York to make their way, they're broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition. There is kind, handsome Willem, an aspiring actor; JB, a quick-witted, sometimes cruel Brooklyn-born painter seeking entry to the art world; Malcolm, a frustrated architect at a prominent firm; and withdrawn, brilliant, enigmatic Jude, who serves as their center of gravity. Over the decades, their relationships deepen and darken, tinged by addiction, success, and pride. Yet their greatest challenge, each comes to realize, is Jude himself, by midlife a terrifyingly talented litigator yet an increasingly broken man, his mind and body scarred by an unspeakable childhood, and haunted by what he fears is a degree of trauma that he'll not only be unable to overcome—but that will define his life forever.
In rich and resplendent prose, Yanagihara has fashioned a tragic and transcendent hymn to brotherly love, a masterful depiction of heartbreak, and a dark examination of the tyranny of memory and the limits of human endurance.
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Community Reviews
A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara
720 pages
What’s it about?
Initially (the first 200 pages or so) I would have said that this book was about four college roommates and how the relationships among them evolve and change over time. Part way through the novel I realized that this story really centered on one main character, Jude, and how the abuse in his childhood forever changed him.
What did I think?
I hear the saying “you are the stories you tell yourself” all the time. This book so portrays that truth. Do those who suffer truly horrific traumas in childhood ever really get past them? Do they have the ability to change the stories they tell themselves? Maybe some do, but this is a novel about the struggle one such person faces. This novel was beautiful, wise and affirming and at the same time it was brutal, dark and at times hard to read.
Should you read it?
I would highly recommend this book, but not to everyone. It is sad and dark but an incredible character driven novel with lots of pearls of wisdom. If you are looking for a quick light read skip this one. If you can handle a novel with a dark side, then this one should not be missed!
Quote-
“I have never been one of those people- I know you aren’t either, who feels that the love one has for a child is somehow a superior love, one more meaningful, more significant, and grander than any other. I didn’t feel that before Jacob, and I didn’t feel that after. But it is a singular love, because it is a love whose foundation is not physical attraction, or pleasure, or intellect, but fear. You have never known fear until you have a child, and maybe that is what tricks us into thinking that it is more magnificent, because the fear is more magnificent. Every day your first thought is not “I love him” but “How is he?” The world overnight rearranges itself into an obstacle course of terrors. I would hold him in my arms and wait to cross the street and would think how absurd it was that my child, that any child, could expect to survive this life.“
Question--
Should Jude be expected to change the story he tells himself? Is it a realistic hope?
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The story starts out seeming like a "coming of age" novel about a group of friends who all graduated from the same New England college and move to NYC to make their way in their respective careers. But it becomes clear that it's the "little life" of Jude that we're focusing on as we're given, little by little, the details of his horrific childhood, and it's a wonder he survived, let alone achieved such success in college, in his career, and with these very important, very special friendships. But even with all that he's accomplished, with everything he's gained, nothing can erase his nightmare past and the emotional and physical damage that was done to him. He becomes more and more broken as time goes by, even with all the people in his life who have come to love and care for him.
A sad, but at the same time hopeful, look at humanity.
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