Hanya Yanagihara - The People In The Trees (Picador, 2013) ***

 

I have rarely been so disappointed by the denouement of a book as with this one. Hanya Yanagihara writes a truly excellent book, with a brilliant style, a slow and careful build-up, only to make it end with a rather immature element that she kept hidden from the readers all along. It's a cheap trick that the book and the quality of her writing does not deserve. Sorry for this harsh judgment, given with mixed feelings. 

It's the story about a young doctor, Norton Perina, working in a laboratory who gets the opportunity to accompany Paul Tallent, an anthropologist, to look for an unknown tribe on an island in the Pacific. Apparently, among this tribe some people live for hundreds of years, but increasingly senile. Perina uncovers the reason for their longevity and eventually gets the Nobel Prize for his work, but that's not how the book ends of course. 

As said, Yanagihara's writing is excellent. Here are some examples. 

"Labs at that time were not like the ones today. Not that I cared a terrible amount about my colleagues' lives, the things they were interested in outside of the office, but there was at work a kind of conservatism, a fixation on neatness, that I found difficult and dispiriting. In those days science considered itself the realm of gentlemen. This was the era, after all, of Linus Pauling and J. Robert Oppenheimer, both of them exceptional, of course, but not exempt from having to dress a certain way, or from being able to perform at cocktail parties, or from pursuing romance. Genius was no excuse for social ineptitude, the way it is today, when a certain refusal to acquire the most basic social skills or an inability to dress properly or feed oneself is generously perceived as evidence of one's intellectual purity and commitment to the life of the mind." (p58)

The experience of the explorers on the remote island completely desintegrates the author from all things known and familiar to him. 

"And yet-and this was even more frightening still - I could also feel something within me come undone. Even today, all these decades later, I cannot explain it with any greater accuracy. I found myself suddenly imagining a long, fat, chalked line stretching across a flat burned earth. To one side was what I had known, a neat-bricked city of windowless structures, the stuff and facts I knew to be true (I thought, unbidden, of my staircase, its names of those wiser than I, and was at once embarrassed for myself, for finding myself in this situation, in speechless thrall to an anthropologist). And on the other side was Tallent's world, the shape of which I could not see, for it was obscured by a fog, one that thinned and thickened in unpredictable movements, so that I could discern, occasionally, glimpses of what lay behind it: nothing more than colors and movements, no real shapes; but there was something irresistible there, I knew it, and the fear of succumbing to it was finally less awful than never knowing what lay beyond that fog, never exploring what I might never again have the opportunity to explore.  And so I closed my eyes; I forgot my senses; and I stepped over the line." (p. 94)

or :  

"We slept then, all of us, even the guides, and when I woke and saw the others' still bodies, I thought for a minute that they were dead and I was alone in this strange, sunlit place, surrounded by trees I did not know the names of and birds I could hear but could not see, and that no one would ever know I was here or remember I had ever existed or would ever find me. The sensation was fleeting, but what I would remember is how quickly, like a breath, I moved from despair to resignation, how well equipped the human mind is to readjust to its realities, to soothe oneself of one's deepest fears. And then I felt proud, I suppose, of my very humanness, and briefly invincible, and sure that I would be greeted with nothing in the next day that I could not bear." (p. 102)

Both excerpts demonstrate the unsettling, uncanny, unheimlich situation a person can be in when all known elements - rationality, familiarity, logic - have to be given up to get a full grasp of what is happening or to be part of something that you have no ideas what it is. The novels and especially the writing style of H.P. Lovecraft often come to mind, as you can deduct from the above. 

My negative comment at the beginning may scare you off. I still think it's a novel worth reading. I did not read her other novels yet: "A Little Life" and "To Paradise". Based on her writing skills, I assume they are still on my reading list.