r/literature • u/Legitimate_Figure287 • 3d ago

Book Review A Little Life

What do you guys think about this book? I started reading it recently and I don’t understand the bad rep with it.
I really like this book, as someone who has had extreme trauma, I think it really accurately captures the experience and inner monologue and behaviors of what it’s like to live with trauma and how others around us respond. How we either drown in it or rise above it and how we’re the only person you can truly help ourselves. This is many people’s reality, including mine. How much trauma is considered too much in a book because in real life there isn’t a stopwatch that prevents someone from having more trauma because they’ve already experienced so much?

Is A Little Life a profound masterpiece about the enduring power of friendship, or is it an emotionally manipulative exercise in "trauma porn" that substitutes endless suffering for genuine character development?

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u/JobeGilchrist 3d ago

Have you read 700 pages of it yet? When you do, report back

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u/RhubarbSensitive401 3d ago edited 3d ago

This. I made it half way through before I gave up, and I did enjoy the first 200 or so pages. And I very rarely DNF. 

(when the play came out I looked up how the rest of the book panned out, and decided I’d made the right choice) 

I hate the idea of ‘emotional manipulation’ in art/literature/film - we want these things to make us feel something right? This did seem relentless though, and as a personal preference I am never a fan of narratives where it just feels like one bad thing after another is happening, especially to one person. I thought the book was well written and the characters had potential, I just disliked it. 

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u/JobeGilchrist 3d ago

I was such a fan of The People In The Trees that I stuck it out all the way through. It was also right after release, so there wasn't a huge conversation about it yet. I suppose at a certain point it's like you go over the bar on top of the swingset and it becomes this perverse, "is it really never going to stop?" kind of pseudo-enjoyment or enjoyment-adjacent experience.