![]() ![]() “Otherwise, it becomes too much, and then it becomes only about that.” ![]() Jude, who van Hove estimates cuts himself “20 times or something” in the novel, does so three or four times here. The production may be four hours long, but that still required the first 80 pages of the book to be turned into just ten minutes of performance. “In the theater, of course, there’s the beginning, middle, and an end,” says van Hove. Onstage, these details must give way to something more recognizably plotlike. “But because you know all this, because you are being confronted with all this information about how they walk - all this extra information - in the end, when you close the book, you have the feeling that this is a living character, that it’s not fiction. “She writes it so elaborately - how they eat, what they do, to which music they listen, where they are - that at some point you would think, Well, you could condense that a little bit,” Nasr says. ![]() Intense, overwhelming sadness occurs in the same tone as great love and mediocre pho. Small aspects of life and lifestyle compound upon one another: Food, art, and scenery are described but not judged. Yet that damage is just one part of A Little Life, a book marked not only by its agony but by its detail. “We’re talking about people who cut themselves, people who have depressions, people who are in abusive relationships, and people who commit suicide or do attempt,” he says. Nasr portrays Jude as someone who is as much a wound as he is a person, as much a literary victim as Tess of the d’Urbervilles or the biblical Job, a man so cloaked in pain that his continued existence is itself shocking. Like the book, it’s not an easy experience. This adaptation, directed by Ivo van Hove, premiered in Amsterdam four years ago and is only now coming to the city where its action takes place via the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Francis, the story’s protagonist, whom he’s been playing since 2018. ![]() The race is a four-hour adaptation of Hanya Yanagihara’s 2015 novel, A Little Life, and the hell is the emotional landscape of Jude St. Perhaps the new book, like A Little Life, will get bids for a potential TV adaptation? Either way, we bet Antoni Porowski will be reading.“I call it the marathon into hell,” says Ramsey Nasr. “That the novel has such scope and range and ambition, yet feels so intimate, is a testament to Hanya Yanagihara’s capacious mind, imagination, and heart,” Doubleday’s publisher and editor-in-chief Bill Thomas said in a statement. The cast of characters includes a fragile descendant of a distinguished family who prefers a poor music teacher over the suitor seeking their hand in marriage, a young Hawaiian man who is keeping secrets about himself and his father from his older and wealthier partner, and a woman who is learning to live without her powerful scientist grandfather while trying to make sense of her husband’s mysterious disappearances. According to a release, To Paradise explores the way humans long to find a place in an earthly paradise and gradually realize that it can’t exist. Her new book spans three different centuries and versions of America: 1893, when New York is part of the “Free States” 1993, when Manhattan was besieged by the AIDS epidemic and 2093, when the world faces plagues and totalitarian rule. The author’s last title, A Little Life, won the 2015 Kirkus Prize and was a finalist for both the Booker Prize and National Book Award. Hanya Yanagihara’s next novel, To Paradise, will be published by Doubleday on January 11, 2022. Photo-Illustration: by Vulture Photo by Publisher ![]()
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