Book Review: The People in the Trees by Hanya Yanagihara

Reading The People in the Trees by Hanya Yanagihara reminded my of the times when I was capable of immersing into reading without acknowledging any other external occurences. At a great extent, our moods and current situation affects our perception of a book. Therefore, reading is subjective, and subjective is also the reading of a fragment of reality.

It is clear for me that Yanagihara, who assesses her right of writing ´about whatever´ she wants, loves writing and takes all the time in the world for doing it. It is an act of restoring both the right and the pleasure of the reader. Why to accept some ready-made novella when the writer can gift you the pleasure of a long dense and interesting novel.

There are ´real´ facts The People in the Trees is based upon: the case of Nobel Prize winner Daniel Carleton Gajdusek convincted of paedophilia - who inspired Yanagihara to write her second novel as well, A Little Life (soon to be reviewed), the fascination for Amazonian tribes and the different experiments - of medical and intellectual nature - they were exposed to. But the rest of the book is the pure result of interdisciplinary and intertextuality.  

Dr. Abraham Norton Perina is authoring his memoirs from the isolation of his prison cell. Condemned for abusing his own adopted children, he is recalling his encounters with the imaginary group of U´ivu. The encounters are nostalgically remembered as slices of a lost paradise, and the eternal search for the immortality - or at least hundred-year survival on earth. 

The reader may be so caught into the anthropological journey that one will completely omit the circumstances the memoirs are written, outside any ethical outline of the character. There is always surprise once we acknowledge the evil, especially when this occurs in intellectual places on which we actually project our intellectual expectations. We expect science to work for good, and scientists and intellectuals in general to dedicated their life to the general´s good.   

It is a fascinating read, especially if you cheat a bit and knew what will happen in the end. It makes you expect when it will happen and when there will be a turn of page into the opposite direction of good. But even this ´moral´ layer is less relevant: writing literature does not need anyone´s approval and evaluation anyway, and this freedom is such an important asset of Yanagihara´s writing. It desinhibits and inspires in a way that not too many writers do nowadays.

A special note to the beautiful cover too, which perfectly illustrates both the beauty and the strange distraction of nature.

Rating: 4.5 stars