Journey to the lost shores of Ivu’ivu

The People in the Trees by Hanya Yanagihara
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book is what literature is all about. This is what narrative is all about. I am at a loss for words. Hanya Yanagihara is an impossibly talented writer and this is an impossibly weighty, old-school, Russian-masters novel.

I will say no more. The plot device in this book is impeccable, but so delicate, that I can spoil the experience for other readers if I’m not careful. And I don’t feel careful. Suffice it to say that Yanagihara’s masterful description, atmosphere, haunting prose, island of Ivu’ivu, and characters will be with me for a long time.

Many brilliant passages (entire pages, even) became lodged in my memory as I read on… Many. I’ll share an early one, and begrudge you the others:

“For years afterward, I had dreams in which my mother appeared in strange forms, her features sewn onto other beings in combinations that seemed both grotesque and profound: as a slippery white fish at the end of my hook, with a trout’s gaping, sorrowful mouth and her dark, shuttered eyes; as the elm tree at the edge of our property, its ragged clumps of tarnished gold leaves replaced by knotted skeins of her black hair; as the lame gray dog that lived on the Mueller’s property, whose mouth, her mouth, opened and closed in yearning and who never made a sound. As I grew older, I came to realize that death had been easy for my mother; to fear death, you must first have something to tether you to life. But she had not. It was as if she had been preparing for her death the entire time I knew her. One day she was alive; the next, not.

And as Sybil said, she was lucky. For what more could we presume to ask from death — but kindness?”

Ok, just one more:

“When he came down, he was slower, and clutching something his hand. He leapt down the last five feet or so and came over to me, uncurling his fingers. In his palm was something trembling and silky and the bright, delicious pale gold of apples; in the gloom of the jungle it looked like light itself. Uva nudged the thing with a finger and it turned over, and I could see it was a monkey of some sort, though no monkey I had ever seen before; it was only a few inches larger than one of the mice I had once been tasked with killing, and his face was a wrinkled black heart, its features pinched together but its eyes large and as blankly blue as a blind kitten’s. It had tiny, perfectly formed hands, one of which was gripping its tail, which it had wrapped around itself and which was flamboyantly furred, its hair hanging like a fringe.”

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