![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Reading Wednesday
Aug. 5th, 2020 10:15 am Just finished: Nothing, this current one is a tome.
Currently reading: A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara, Holy shit is this novel just 600 pages of torture porn? Like...it started out being about these four friends in New York City who were arty and vaguely dissatisfied with life and then hoo boy does it take a turn into hardcore trauma. I'm almost done and at this point, the author seems to have lost all interest in all of the characters except Jude. Which is understandable as he is essentially a walking Victorian novel. With all of these literary types around, it's a disappointment that no one has yet commented that his cartoonishly awful life is a Victorian novel. I mean [spoilers and also big trigger warnings] he is abandoned in a garbage can as a baby, raised in a monastery where they regularly beat and rape him, then he's kidnapped by one of the monks who forces him into sex slavery, where he contracts all of the mysterious venereal diseases and starts self-harming, then he escapes and he's sent to a foster care home, where guess what, he's raped and beaten a bunch more, then he runs away and is found by a psychiatrist who keeps him locked in the basement and you may see a pattern here, then the psychiatrist gets sick of him and runs him over with a car, then he's rescued by a nice lesbian social worker who dies of cancer, then he secretly self-harms for hundreds of pages, then gets into an abusive relationship with a dude who beats and rapes him some more and almost kills him, then he attempts suicide, and his heretofore heterosexual best friend realizes he's in love with him and they hook up, but he can't enjoy sex on account of the aforementioned, so they eventually settle into a sexless relationship that's kind of good, but his legs keep getting infected because of being run over by a car and eventually he has to have them amputated, and then his partner and one of his other friends die in a car accident.[/spoilers] Is there a point to this? I still have about 70 pages left so I'll let you know. Anyway plot-wise, it feels a bit like super melodramatic fanfic, in the sense that the author seems to take an almost erotic interest in describing his horrific suffering and how pretty he is, and also that we are presumably supposed to care about these characters for some other reason besides their lives being awful. Except it's written in very lovely, very haunting prose.
I had a weird conversation about it, because I started out really liking it and enjoying the characters, but I'm in a Discord group and it was brought up as an example of why straight women writing gay men is Problematic. I had only just started and the most prominent gay character at the beginning is JB (everyone else's sexuality is ambiguous), and I'm like, uhhh? He's obviously not Perfect Representation but I don't see a problem and his sexuality doesn't feel fetishy, plus there is a long tradition of men of all sexualities writing women of all sexualities in problematic ways, and they don't get half the crap for it that straight women who write m/m fanfic seem to get in the Discourse. And besides Brokeback Mountain and, like, BL and yaoi, I couldn't think of any examples outside of fandom, and I wouldn't say any of those are major social problems. Also criticizing a WOC for how she depicts wealthy (primarily) white dudes is a bit ehhhh. I was actually going to give the author some points for not making the main queer character a perfect cinnamon roll solely defined by his sexual orientation, but...turns out 1) he's not actually the main queer character they were talking about, and 2) hoo-boy Good Representation is not the major problem here. I may have to admit that the #Woke Kids are correct.
Anyway obviously if it wasn't well-written, I wouldn't have read 500 pages of it. But I dearly hope the author is coming to a point.
Currently reading: A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara, Holy shit is this novel just 600 pages of torture porn? Like...it started out being about these four friends in New York City who were arty and vaguely dissatisfied with life and then hoo boy does it take a turn into hardcore trauma. I'm almost done and at this point, the author seems to have lost all interest in all of the characters except Jude. Which is understandable as he is essentially a walking Victorian novel. With all of these literary types around, it's a disappointment that no one has yet commented that his cartoonishly awful life is a Victorian novel. I mean [spoilers and also big trigger warnings] he is abandoned in a garbage can as a baby, raised in a monastery where they regularly beat and rape him, then he's kidnapped by one of the monks who forces him into sex slavery, where he contracts all of the mysterious venereal diseases and starts self-harming, then he escapes and he's sent to a foster care home, where guess what, he's raped and beaten a bunch more, then he runs away and is found by a psychiatrist who keeps him locked in the basement and you may see a pattern here, then the psychiatrist gets sick of him and runs him over with a car, then he's rescued by a nice lesbian social worker who dies of cancer, then he secretly self-harms for hundreds of pages, then gets into an abusive relationship with a dude who beats and rapes him some more and almost kills him, then he attempts suicide, and his heretofore heterosexual best friend realizes he's in love with him and they hook up, but he can't enjoy sex on account of the aforementioned, so they eventually settle into a sexless relationship that's kind of good, but his legs keep getting infected because of being run over by a car and eventually he has to have them amputated, and then his partner and one of his other friends die in a car accident.[/spoilers] Is there a point to this? I still have about 70 pages left so I'll let you know. Anyway plot-wise, it feels a bit like super melodramatic fanfic, in the sense that the author seems to take an almost erotic interest in describing his horrific suffering and how pretty he is, and also that we are presumably supposed to care about these characters for some other reason besides their lives being awful. Except it's written in very lovely, very haunting prose.
I had a weird conversation about it, because I started out really liking it and enjoying the characters, but I'm in a Discord group and it was brought up as an example of why straight women writing gay men is Problematic. I had only just started and the most prominent gay character at the beginning is JB (everyone else's sexuality is ambiguous), and I'm like, uhhh? He's obviously not Perfect Representation but I don't see a problem and his sexuality doesn't feel fetishy, plus there is a long tradition of men of all sexualities writing women of all sexualities in problematic ways, and they don't get half the crap for it that straight women who write m/m fanfic seem to get in the Discourse. And besides Brokeback Mountain and, like, BL and yaoi, I couldn't think of any examples outside of fandom, and I wouldn't say any of those are major social problems. Also criticizing a WOC for how she depicts wealthy (primarily) white dudes is a bit ehhhh. I was actually going to give the author some points for not making the main queer character a perfect cinnamon roll solely defined by his sexual orientation, but...turns out 1) he's not actually the main queer character they were talking about, and 2) hoo-boy Good Representation is not the major problem here. I may have to admit that the #Woke Kids are correct.
Anyway obviously if it wasn't well-written, I wouldn't have read 500 pages of it. But I dearly hope the author is coming to a point.
