yawnsbooks's Reviews (510)

The People In The Trees by Hanya Yanagihara was an absolutely fascinating read. 

This book really explores the dark side of academia by beginning as a “last testimony” of a disgraced Nobel Prize Laureate imprisoned for sexually assaulting his adopted children.

This novel, written as an essay (complete with multiple pages of footnotes and citations), follows Dr. Norton Perina in his anthropological and scientific field work studying a rumoured “lost tribe” in a small Micronesian nation who have inexplicably long life spans. Perina begins theorizing and testing his reasons for the phenomena, which include the ritual consumption of raw meat of an endemic turtle species. 

The rest of the novel follows Perina’s incredibly xenophobic and racist perspectives about the islanders and their cultural practices, his complicated relationship with academia, and his white-saviour complex. 

This book was complex, dense, original, disturbing, fascinating, and multi-layered. It was astounding in its delivery and ability to keep me reading despite absolutely hating a protagonist with absolutely no reeding qualities. I can’t wait to read the discussion around this book - one of my favourite reads this year; but be warned this book has literally every trigger and content warning you can think of. 

Hated the character and the writing.