What do we expect of our friends? Or should we not expect anything from them? Is friendship a balance of give and take? Other than the fact that friends are those having the same intellectual and emotional vibes, one who doesn’t take you for granted, what qualities do we see in a potential friend?
A little life is a story about four friends, who meet at the undergrad level, Jude, Willem, Malcolm, and JB. Willem's love for Jude is magical. An orphan, Judea at the age of thirty gets adopted by an angelic guy named Harold. I adored the part where Harold adopts Jude. And I loved the character too.
Jude is a brilliant, handsome guy with a slight limp due to his spinal injury. He has had a traumatic past where he was raped, sexually abused, and tortured even. The past torments him throughout the book due to which he fears any relationship. He is self-loathing, self-harming, self-doubting,
finding no salve for his mental gnawing. Jude’s past and its psychological impact were depressing and heartbreaking.
The beginning of the book felt like Ayn Rand’s Fountainhead, where we see struggling youngsters and part of the book read like Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. The author has done an amazing job of writing about a traumatic, sexually abused person and how it affects him throughout his life. It read like Lolita, being narrated from Lolita’s point of view. The toughest reads were the parts he'd hurt himself. I felt horrible reading those parts.
Although he has another amazing friend who is an orthopaedic surgeon, Andy who helps him through many situations, he rarely refers him to a therapist. He visits the therapist almost towards the end and mostly avoids going to him. It would have been so much easier if he had been to a therapist right from the time he was at the university. But why didn't he go to a therapist from the beginning?? And why didn’t Andy, Willem and Harold force him to see a therapist?
He gets lucky finding amazing friends and an ever-loving father, all of whom love him for his outlook and the good soul that he is rather than his appearance or his so-called ‘flaws’.
In an interview that I watched on YouTube, the author says that the book is a fairy tale/fantasy which means the friendship portrayed is highly improbable. It’s exactly like Cinderella, who magically gets a fairy godmother when she is in distress.
It is a depiction of a perfectly ideal situation, where there are friends who dote on him forever, giving utmost care and love selflessly, prioritizing Jude over themselves. Life is full of difficulties and hardships, people don't like to hear about illnesses, injuries, and pains. Often, they sympathise but do not empathise. If one were to recreate these situations in real life such people might not exist or might not be so involved.
It’s a brilliantly written book with some amazing quotes but a tragic tale not meant for the weak-hearted!