Description
An Amazon Best Book of January 2022: To Paradise by Hanya Yanagihara is a completely immersive and downright extraordinary story of men and women, lovers and friends, grandparents and grandchildren, that spans three different time periods (1893, 1993, 2093) as each grapple with relationships, family legacies, fame and fortune, and the fate of America. It’s easy to fall in step rooting for these characters (who often bear the same name) who at times try to defy their legacy and other times try to uphold it—whether in a Manhattan mansion, a tent in Hawaii, or an apartment in a dystopian future. The novel calls to mind David Mitchell, with a dash of Edith Wharton, and something new altogether. To Paradise tows the line between the imagined and the real probing at the different ways families can be and countries can be, resulting in another triumphant work of fiction by the author of A Little Life . —Al Woodworth, Amazon Editor #1 NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • ON PRESIDENT OBAMA’S SUMMER READING LIST A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: VOGUE • ESQUIRE • GLAMOUR • NPR • GOODREADS • O MAGAZINE “Remarkable…The emotional impact of this novel is less visceral than A LITTLE LIFE but only because the author’s scope is so vast and her dexterity so dazzling….TO PARADISE demonstrates the inexhaustible ingenuity of an author who keeps shattering expectations….she explores the dream of freedom that lures all these characters to risk everything for a paradise they desire but can barely envision.xa0 No matter the setting – past present or future – TO PARADISE stems from the hypnotic confluence of Yanagihara’s skills.xa0 She speaks softly, with the urgency of a whisper.xa0 She draws us into the most intimate sympathy with these characters while placing them in crises that feel irresistibly compelling.” —xa0Ron Charles, The Washington Post “We are given a patriarch, wealth, children; there is an arranged marriage, an inheritance, a true love, a class divide and a significant twist. Deftly paced and judiciously detailed, the tale makes hay with the conventions of the 19th-century novel. But that’s not all. With breathtaking audacity Yanagihara rewrites America….Yanagihara masterfully repurposes themes, situations and motifs…This ambitious novel tackles major American questions and answers them in an original, engrossing way. It has a major feel. But it is finally in [its] minor moments that Yanagihara shows greatness.” —xa0Gish Jen, The New York Times Book Review (cover review)"The confounding, brilliant, intricate, beautiful, horrific To Paradise is—if this string of adjectives did not sufficiently convey it—an extraordinary book. Divided into three seemingly distinct sections, positioned a hundred years apart, the book is one-part historical fiction (set in 1893), part present-ish-day chronicle (1993), and part futuristic sci-fi story (2093). (That last chapter, which must have been informed by, if not fully drafted within, the pandemic, presents a dystopian future filled with 'cooling suits' required to venture outside and 'decontamination chambers' to ward off the ever-present possibility of infection.) Those who consumed Yanagihara’s most recent work, A Little Life , will not be surprised that this book, like its predecessor, is interested in pain and suffering more than joy and happiness. But it is also a book full of gloriously painted scenes, tantalizing connection, and despite all its gutting turns, one that maintains an abiding hope for the possibility and power of love. (That may just be the only paradise truly on offer.) In and of themselves, some sections feel in some ways quite conventional, but taken together—with all of their extreme cliffhangers and unanswered questions—the stories seem to be asking: what do we want from a novel? Resolution is not available here, but some of the most poignant feelings that literature can elicit certainly are." — Vogue “Sometimes literature takes time to digest momentous events... Occasionally, though, a masterpiece emerges from the white heat of the moment: T he Great Gatsby, The Decameron, The Waste Land . There's somethingxa0miraculousxa0about reading To Paradise while the coronavirus crisis is still playing out around us, the dizzying sense that you're immersed in a novel that will come to represent the age, its obsessions and anxieties. It's rare that you get the opportunity to review a masterpiece, but To Paradise , definitively, is one.” —xa0The Observer (London) xa0"Sweeping, lush, and gorgeouslyxa0written." —xa0NPR "To Paradise" is a novel of the highest order. Yanagihara writes with elegance, evoking emotion and rendering believable characters who move the plot. Her perceptive eye is evident in the three separate settings, placing the reader in each time frame through multiple narratives, which she orchestrates with great acuity. Themes of love and belonging reign in Book I and Book II. In Book III, fear trumps love for a mimesis of reality, hitting close to home for all of us right now."— Wayne Catan , USA Today “Hanya Yanagihara’s critically-acclaimed “A Little Life” was an intimate, close-up portrait of four men and their love, shame, and existential loneliness. Her new book, “To Paradise,” is a sprawling, yet similarly intimate epic that is also focused on love, shame, and existential loneliness. Other than these shared themes (and heft), the two books have little in common besides Yanagihara’s masterful, transfixing writing, and her ability to plumb the depths of her characters at their most despicable and at their most tender. On the surface, what ties the three books together are the repetition of character names (David, Charles, Edward, etc.) and the house on Washington Square Park that appears in each book in one iteration or another. But there are deeper, more ineffable ties, in the form of moral and political questions: What does it mean to be free? What does it mean to be protected? Does the latter preclude the possibility of the former? Are gilded cages any less restrictive for being gilded? “To Paradise” doesn’t definitively answer these questions, but revels in ambivalence rather than moral absolutes, making it a rich, emotional, and thought-provoking read.”— Boston Globe "Tour de force…Yanagihara changes the novel landscape: What is different, we accept; what is familiar, we recognize. To Paradise resonates because of its exploration of human relationships and the dismantling of preconceived notions. Biases and hatreds lurk and linger, emerging periodically to remind us that while one form of discrimination may have been eliminated, others remain embedded in our institutions, and cannot easily be eradicated; in the end, threads of prejudice bind all three parts. And yet To Paradise is rich with characters that live and love, with few boundaries. Yanagihara asks us to consider an alternative America that could have existed at any point in history if other decisions had been made, and that might still prevail if we do the right thing." —xa0Oprah Daily “Gigantic, strange, exquisite, terrifying, and replete with mystery.”— Kirkus Reviews (starred) xa0 “An extraordinary novel; powerfully imagined and deeply moving.” —The Bookseller (London) “A tale of manners, family, migration, and political dystopia that reads like Edith Wharton meetsxa0Jonathan Franzenxa0meetsxa0Mohsin Hamidxa0meets George Orwell.” —xa0Vanity Fair “To Paradise boldly rewrites America’s past, present and future. Featuring three distinct fin-de-siècle periods — 1893, 1993 and 2093 — the result is a spectacular tripartite fiction. Here is an alternative country in which profound questions of family, inheritance, sovereignty, identity and, above all, the meaning of freedom, are dazzlingly held up to the light….To Paradise is, like [A Little Life], a complex work of intertwined human relationships, but it is also sublimely readable….The finale of To Paradise is a masterstroke, simultaneously thriller-esque and intensely moving.” —xa0The Financial Times “TO PARADISE is a transcendent, visionary novel of stunning scope and depth.xa0 A novel so layered, so rich, so relevant, so full of the joys and terrors—the pure mystery—of human life, is not only rare, it’s revolutionary.” —xa0Michael Cunningham, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of THE HOURS “Hanya Yanagihara’s TO PARADISE is as good as WAR AND PEACE.” —xa0Edmund White “Hanya Yanagihara interrogates love and history in a novel that feels prophetic, but in fact rises from the oldest of human themes: ardor, shame, and our most profound protective instincts.xa0 She builds a future narrated by vulnerable yet sturdy Charlie, a merciful heart burning for all creation. To Paradise is a world of its own, a major work, and one of the rare books equipped to tell us what it means to be an American.” —xa0Louise Erdrich , Author of Pulitzer Prize winning The Night Watchman and NYT Bestseller The Sentence Hanya Yanagihara lives in New York City. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Book I<br><br>WASHINGTON SQUARE<br><br>I<br><br>He had come into the habit, before dinner, of taking a walk around the park: ten laps, as slow as he pleased on some evenings, briskly on others, and then back up the stairs of the house and to his room to wash his hands and straighten his tie before descending again to the table. Today, though, as he was leaving, the little maid handing him his gloves said, “Mister Bingham says to remind you that your brother and sister are coming tonight for supper,” and he said, “Yes, thank you, Jane, for reminding me,” as if he’d in fact forgotten, and she made a little curtsy and closed the door behind him.<br><br>He would have to go more quickly than he would were his time his own, but he found himself being deliberately contrary, walking instead at his slower pace, listening to the clicks of his boot heels on the pavestones ringing purposefully in the cold air. The day was over, almost, and the sky was the particular rich ink-purple that he couldn’t see without remembering, achily, being away at school and watching everything shade itself black and the outline of the trees dissolve in front of him.<br><br>Winter would be upon them soon, and he had worn only his light coat, but nevertheless, he kept going, crossing his arms snug against his chest and turning up his lapels. Even after the bells rang five, he put his head down and continued moving forward, and it wasn’t until he had finished his fifth circumnavigation that he turned, sighing, to walk north on one of the paths to the house, and up its neat stone steps, with the door opening for him before he reached the top, the butler reaching already for his hat.<br><br>“In the parlor, Mister David.”<br><br>“Thank you, Adams.”<br><br>Outside the parlor doors he stood, passing his hands repeatedly over his hair—a nervous habit of his, much as the repeated smoothing of his forelock as he read or drew, or the light drawing of his forefinger beneath his nose as he thought or waited for his turn at the chessboard, or any number of other displays to which he was given—before sighing again and opening both doors at once in a gesture of confidence and conviction that he of course did not possess. They looked over at him as a group, but passively, neither pleased nor dismayed to see him. He was a chair, a clock, a scarf draped over the back of the settee, something the eye had registered so many times that it now glided over it, its presence so familiar that it had already been drawn and pasted into the scene before the curtain rose.<br><br>“Late again,” said John, before he’d had a chance to say anything, but his voice was mild and he seemed not to be in a scolding mood, though one never quite knew with John.<br><br>“John,” he said, ignoring his brother’s comment but shaking his hand and the hand of his husband, Peter; “Eden”—kissing first his sister and then her wife, Eliza, on their right cheeks—“where’s Grandfather?”<br><br>“Cellar.”<br><br>“Ah.”<br><br>They all stood there for a moment in silence, and for a second David felt the old embarrassment he often sensed for the three of them, the Bingham siblings, that they should have nothing to say to one another—or, rather, that they should not know how to say anything—were it not for the presence of their grandfather, as if the only thing that made them real to one another were not the fact of their blood or history, but him.<br><br>“Busy day?” asked John, and he looked over at him, quickly, but John’s head was bent over his pipe, and David couldn’t tell how he had intended the question. When he was in doubt, he could usually interpret John’s true meaning by looking at Peter’s face—Peter spoke less but was more expressive, and David often thought that the two of them operated as a single communicative unit, Peter illuminating with his eyes and jaw what John said, or John articulating those frowns and grimaces and brief smiles that winked across Peter’s face, but this time Peter was blank, as blank as John’s voice, and therefore of no help, and so he was forced to answer as if the question had been meant plainly, which it perhaps had.<br><br>“Not so much,” he said, and the truth of that answer—its obviousness, its undeniability—was so inarguable and stark that it again felt as if the room had gone still, and that even John was ashamed to have asked such a question. And then David began to try to do what he sometimes did, which was worse, which was to explain himself, to try to give word and form to what his days were. “I was reading—” But, oh, he was spared from further humiliation, because here was their grandfather entering the room, a dark bottle of wine furred in a mouse-gray felt of dust held aloft, exclaiming his triumph—he had found it!—even before he was fully among them, telling Adams they’d be spontaneous, to decant it now and they’d have it with dinner. “And, ah, look, in the time it took me to locate that blasted bottle, another lovely appearance,” he said, and smiled at David, before turning toward the group so that his smile included them all, an invitation for them to follow him to the dining table, which they did, and where they were to have one of their usual monthly Sunday meals, the six of them in their usual positions around the gleaming oak table—Grandfather at the head, David to his right and Eliza to his, John to Grandfather’s left and Peter to his, Eden at the foot—and their usual murmured, inconsequential conversation: news of the bank, news of Eden’s studies, news of the children, news of Peter’s and Eliza’s families. Outside, the world stormed and burned—the Germans moving ever-deeper into Africa, the French still hacking their way through Indochina, and closer, the latest frights in the Colonies: shootings and hangings and beatings, immolations, events too terrible to contemplate and yet so near as well—but none of these things, especially the ones closest to them, were allowed to pierce the cloud of Grandfather’s dinners, where everything was soft and the hard was made pliable; even the sole had been steamed so expertly that you needed only to scoop it with the spoon held out for you, the bones yielding to the silver’s gentlest nudge. But still, it was difficult, ever more so, not to allow the outside to intrude, and over dessert, a ginger-wine syllabub whipped as light as milk froth, David wondered whether the others were thinking, as he was, of that precious gingerroot that had been found and dug in the Colonies and brought to them here in the Free States and bought by Cook at great expense: Who had been forced to dig and harvest the roots? From whose hands had it been taken?<br><br>After dinner, they reconvened in the parlor and Matthew poured the coffee and tea and Grandfather had shifted in his seat, just a bit, when Eliza suddenly sprung to her feet and said, “Peter, I keep meaning to show you the picture in that book of that extraordinary seabird I mentioned to you last week and promised I wouldn’t let myself forget again tonight; Grandfather Bingham, might I?” and Grandfather nodded and said, “Of course, child,” and Peter stood then, too, and they left the room, arm in arm, Eden looking proud to have a wife who was so well attuned to everything around her, who could anticipate when the Binghams would want to be alone and would know how to gracefully remove herself from their presence. Eliza was red-haired and thick-limbed, and when she moved through the parlor, the little glass ornaments trimming the table lamps shivered and jingled, but in this respect she was light and swift, and they had all had occasion to be grateful to her for this knowingness she possessed.<br><br>So they were to have the conversation Grandfather had told him they would back in January, when the year was new. And yet each month they had waited, and each month, after each family dinner—and after first Independence Day, and then Easter, and then May Day, and then Grandfather’s birthday, and all the other special occasions for which the group of them gathered—they had not, and had not, and had not, and now here it was, the second Sunday in October, and they were to discuss it after all. The others, too, instantly understood the topic, and there was a general coming-to, a returning to plates and saucers of bitten-into biscuits and half-full teacups, and an uncrossing of legs and straightening of spines, except for Grandfather, who instead leaned deeper into his chair, its seat creaking beneath him. Read more
Features & Highlights
- #1
- NEW YORK TIMES
- BEST SELLER • From the award-winning, best-selling author of the classic
- A Little Life—
- a bold, brilliant novel spanning three centuries and three different versions of the American experiment, about lovers, family, loss and the elusive promise of utopia.A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR:
- VOGUE
- •
- ESQUIRE
- •
- NPR
- • GOODREADS
- To Paradise
- is a
- fin de
- siècle novel of marvelous literary effect, but above all it is a work of emotional genius. The great power of this remarkable novel is driven by Yanagihara’s understanding of the aching desire to protect those we love—partners, lovers, children, friends, family, and even our fellow citizens—and the pain that ensues when we cannot.In an alternate version of 1893 America, New York is part of the Free States, where people may live and love whomever they please (or so it seems). The fragile young scion of a distinguished family resists betrothal to a worthy suitor, drawn to a charming music teacher of no means. In a 1993 Manhattan besieged by the AIDS epidemic, a young Hawaiian man lives with his much older, wealthier partner, hiding his troubled childhood and the fate of his father. And in 2093, in a world riven by plagues and governed by totalitarian rule, a powerful scientist’s damaged granddaughter tries to navigate life without him—and solve the mystery of her husband’s disappearances.These three sections comprise an ingenious symphony, as recurring notes and themes deepen and enrich one another: A townhouse in Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village; illness, and treatments that come at a terrible cost; wealth and squalor; the weak and the strong; race; the definition of family, and of nationhood; the dangerous righteousness of the powerful, and of revolutionaries; the longing to find a place in an earthly paradise, and the gradual realization that it can’t exist. What unites not just the characters, but these Americas, are their reckonings with the qualities that make us human: Fear. Love. Shame. Need. Loneliness.
