These states have built themselves on an acceptance of gay marriage, which has reconfigured traditional family dynamics by normalising adoption. In this reality, New York is one of the “Free States” that seceded from the rest of the US in an alternative vision of the post-civil war era. The novel begins in Washington Square, New York, in 1893.
Taking place over three different centuries, each presenting a slightly skewed version of history, or, in the case of the final section, an imagined future, Yanagihara’s novel marshals a cast of recurring characters through variations of their lives and relationships as they play out in these different worlds. “Suppose the earth were to shift in space, only an inch or two but enough to redraw their world, their country, their city, themselves, entirely?” This question, posed in Book II of Hanya Yanagihara’s latest novel, To Paradise, is the imaginative centre of the whole piece. In this sprawling, dystopian novel, Hanja Yanagihara presents three alternative realities, in which an aura of decay and inevitable doom accompanies everything and everyone.
0 kommentar(er)
