She says America – and Australia for that matter – is obsessed with the idea of success. “Or that you choose to be unhappy – that anyone would choose this, it’s such a miserable thing to say.” “This fiction that you can write your own fate and your own future, that is not true for a lot of people,” she says. The idea that we choose to be happy is a recent concept, an arrogance of the 21st century – and it drives Yanagihara mad. ” If not, you haven’t been bold enough, she says.Ĭhoice and agency in relation to the individual, the family and the state is a significant thread in her books. As a writer, when you finish the book I think you should end up with a lot more questions. The book is not meant to answer those questions but to articulate them. “When you’re beginning a book you’re asking a number of questions. The themes in the trilogy within the book are like echoes, according to the author, a reflection that certain ideas transgress time – and that history does repeat.įor her, writing is about exploring unknowns. It’s an ongoing conversation in the United States – as in Australia – but she says it’s more intense and broad-ranging than ever today. What unites the three sections, according to its author, is the fundamental question: what is America? Yanagihara argues that that aspect of the book is even more predictive than the idea of the pandemic. If A Little Life is “the great gay novel” as The Atlantic said in 2015, To Paradise could well be the great American novel. It is hugely ambitious, exploring family – biological and adopted – love, desire and relationships, all the while investigating colonialism and nationalism, totalitarianism, disease and pandemics and climate change. Three stories about different characters with the same names, possibly different generations of the same families, in different eras and vastly different realities, make up the book, set in 1893, 19. Yanagihara’s latest novel, To Paradise, explores how we live our lives and what it means to live a good one. “Simply getting to be in a place where you’re observing people all day, even if you’re not using any of it directly, but watching their patterns of speech and their movements and concerns, is useful it’s useful in ways that you don’t necessarily immediately identify.”
Apart from practical considerations (ie health insurance), she believes it is critical as a writer to be out in the world. She counts herself lucky that she interacts with them all the time in her day job, as editor-in-chief of T, the New York Times style magazine. To Paradise is three stories within a single volume.
0 kommentar(er)
