Escape to Paradise: A Novel by Hanya Yanagihara

DJEKing: Wow! This is a really powerful book. The prose is exquisite although the subject matter is challenging, as you would expect from the author of "A Little Life". It is a big book and took me the best part of a fortnight to read even though I was on holiday.
It is written in three parts. The first is set in the eastern states of the USA shortly after the civil war and the emancipation of the slaves. The society is, however, rather unexpected and very interesting.
The second part relates to a more recent period of time around the 1980s and contains much more recognisable events and ideas.
The third is set in the future. It is always difficult to represent the future although the author gives full reign to her own ideas and imagination. Everything is plausible. There are frequent pandemics, global warming and a very regimented society with a repressive regime in power - a vision of New York that resembles soviet era communist Russia.
Of course the important thing is what happens to the characters in the different periods and how they are related to each other. I don't want to give the game away as the book deserves to be read. I saw echoes of "Cloud Atlas"...

United Kingdom on Dec 09, 2023

A. Bahn: It can’t be misogyny, if it’s just downright misanthropic, can it?

Three increasingly worse, and long, nightmares. Switching roles with names, between the three was … cute?

I kind of want the time back.

United States on Aug 24, 2023

Selvam S: Nice book

India on Aug 16, 2023

Susan McKendree: This book is a wonder: three fully-realized alternative worlds, connected by a lineage of characters linked by name, temperament, time, place, family history, and, most importantly, a desire to seek better worlds when the ones they inhabit fail them. The timeline is discontinuous, and it is left to readers to make the connections between the stories. Told over a span of two hundred years but confined to three distinct periods of time, each a century apart, the stories unspool against the backdrop of an alternative America. Populated by doting grandfathers, unreliable fathers, and children who must ultimately make their way alone, they begin in a flawed Utopian late-19th-century New York, shifting to 20th-century Hawaii with its royal heritage in free fall and its lush tropical landscape in peril, at last returning to a dystopian, environmentally ravaged 21st-century New York ridden by plague, civic upheaval, and unsettling shifts in power, until the yearning for paradise threatens to fade to an impossible dream. In the end, Yanagahara's "alternative world" reads less like fiction than a future we might well one day face ourselves.

United States on Mar 09, 2023

Ueslei Lee: Para quem espera algo do teor de "Uma vida pequena", lamento informar que este livro rompe com esta expectativa.
A autora consegue, de forma primorosa, tecer as histórias encontradas neste livro de maneira impressionante. É uma das maiores autoras contemporâneas com toda certeza.

Brazil on Jan 23, 2023

merrckd: Some might find the structure and/or the content of this novel challenging, but I find that it is so skillfully done that the result is an honest exploration of who we are as people, how our circumstances shape us, but do not have to define us, the risks of breaking free of the appearance of circumstantial safety, the striving towards something better, love & loss.

There's three sections, but I count five distinct stories told from different POVs. The first section was difficult for me to get through because it seemed like the writer was not doing as much as she could with the alternate history she created. I found it hard to sympathize the protagonist. But, Yanagihara's prose is so strong, she is a highly skilled writer, that I kept pushing through it. Then the ending of the first section was brilliant and maybe the first spark of understanding I had of what she was doing. The next two sections I was fully engaged and quickly read through the rest of the novel. By the end, the brilliance of the framework and stories she constructed was impressive and resonated with me as a reader and human being.

It's my first book I've read from Yanagihara...

United States on Jul 25, 2022

Robert Silverman: There is no need to repeat in other terms the observations by those who have recognized the extraordinary richness and creative complexity of this novel. Reading it is an emotionally difficult experience, and I required a break between sections in order to recover from just-read sections. Embedded, I also noted observations that transcend their location here. For example, on page 587 the comment on the “relevant” Charlie that “I cannot see her without experiencing her in triplicate.” “The shadow of who she once was,” her current reality, and “the projection of what she might become.” And with mourning for the first, bewilderment for the second, and “fear for the third.” Reading this, the book then becomes populated by my grandchildren, some who I frame similarly… and now within a new concept: in triplicate. And grandchildren who do not fit this form: they live in an upward trajectory. And so I spend time exploring my emotional life of loved ones.

And the book’s third section…for me a reflection of the likely outcome of current trends with authoritarian governments, climate failures, the scarcity of food, and likely future...

United States on Jun 15, 2022

Leslie by the sea: I’m glad I read this interesting book. There are shades of Cloud Atlas, or even Cloud Cuckoo Land (why did it not have “Cloud” in the title, I wonder?), with its three parts, which tell stories of NYC in 1893, 1993, and 2093. And let me tell you, none of us want to live in that 2093.

All three stories are compelling. All are set in the same Washington Square mansion, and in each century we follow people named Charles, David (“That’s a lot of Davids,” one character happens to say, and we agree), Edward. In these alternate histories, same-sex marriage is legal and very common, there’s a strong Hawaii story line that starts out following the Hiram Bingham family (I live in Hawaii and found that interesting), and oh my god the pandemic situation does not improve in this imagined future (understatement).

The recurring names in each of the three acts was slightly confusing but also interesting. My tidy brain wanted the relationships between the generations to be easier to follow. I had to make my own chart, or tried anyway, but things got unwieldy fast. Where’s the chart of who’s who? Please add to inside front cover. And everything...

United States on May 02, 2022

m.: I really enjoyed this book. The writing is beautiful, and the three stories are engaging. I really found myself immersed in the book.
I was also moved by the portraits of love - especially the love between parents (or grandparents) and children. The book will stay with me a long time.

Germany on Apr 03, 2022

Debora: Yo había leído a little life y está entre mis libros más preciados, por eso decidí leer este libro. No tiene una secuencia coherente, quedan inconclusas muchas cosas. No me gusto nada.

Mexico on Mar 29, 2022