A little Life

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What is friendship?

How far can we take it?

Can it replace an intimate relationships ?

Can it help us from pangs of the eternal and unchangeable past?

A little life is a deep dive into everything friendship is and can become, it tracks the friendship of four guys who met in college Jude, Williem, JB and Malcom( a heterogeneous group two guys are black and the other two are white)and how their friendship evolved in the decades to come. It equally explores some of the questions about friendship that seem quite easy but can can be very challenging morally and psychologically given a specific context. It is a story of love,diversity, loyalty, compromise, ambition, achievement and how all those comes into play in a friendship.

Among the 4 the story rotates mostly around Jude who is somehow like a heavily encrypted scroll containing the map leading to the holy grail, he does the basics of friendship but never ever discusses his past with any of his friends until the ghosts from his past start invading his reality and forces him to at least reveal part of himself to Williem.

They graduate from college and start chasing their dreams and Jude manages to make his life so much different from his past in hopes of pretending that those phases of his life never existed. His past is so sad that somehow you have never known a person in your life who has suffered that much during childhood that somehow it seems logical when Jude tries tries to end his life by slitting his veins even after managing to become a successful litigator, find supportive friends and eventually get adopted at 30.

A little life is a story of dealing with a person who for sure you know that they have something wrong in their life but out of courtesy you respect their privacy despite knowing that the animal that resides in them will eventually lead them to destruction. But when you are on the receiving end it is equally difficult to tell your story because no matter the reassurances people give you there are certain things that once you tell a person they will never see you the way you they do. Eventually years pass and now speaking out start to look like an act of betrayal because you have kept quite for so long you have somehow even lost the words and each day that passes it becomes more and more difficult and no matter what you do you will always feel undeserving because of your secrets whose effects not only gnaws at you inside but also corrodes your intimate relationships. And no matter the self deception the day of reckoning will surely come and you’ll not run away.

Sometimes we avoid confrontation because we are afraid the person will hate us and looking at how valuable the friendship is and how long it has lasted we simply cannot bear the the consequences. But is it not morally wrong to notice a problem in someone you love and then not try to fix it despite the cost? What if they don’t want to be helped how does you leaving them actually help them in the long run? Sometimes it’s a zugzwang position and anything you do will just worsen the situation and not doing anything(continuing in self deception) is not an option either.

The narrative is long and it’s really excruciating sometimes that you think it is just too much.But somehow I think it is a meta story it’s the story of the microagressions that we suffer grouped together affecting a single person and how important it is to have some people you can rely on in moments of suffering, people who love you and do not just see you as a set of problems.

It is also a narrative about the limits of the capacities of human help. Despite how good our efforts can be somehow we cannot help people who don’t think(who do not want to be helped in one way or another) they can be helped(we can try changing their mind on that and everything depends that ) or even deserve our help. It is equally true when you’re the recipient you have to develop some stamina or you’ll break down once the people who are helping you are taken away from you because no matter how much they love you they are not with you forever and it is human to accept that forthrightly and to love despite all that is what constitutes courage.

The writing style is also captivating, I have not read a book this well written in while(it kept me going even during the more controversial scenes ) and as despite the book being a tragedy it is good tragedy and makes you grateful for the things we usually take for granted because you realise things can hellishly go wrong.

This is last review for this year and hope you had a good one.

Next year am looking forward to doing a podcast or review videos and I would love to know your thoughts on that, you can equally comment books you read this year that you found interesting.

Happy holidays!

@Chungamu