When I finished
reading A Little Life by Hanya
Yanagahara, the beautiful prose stunned me, while I was aghast at the horrors
Jude experienced. I found the story so
absorbing, so gripping, I could not stop until the last page. My mind spun and spun at the incongruity, and
I found it necessary to read more of her work.
So I turned to her first and only other novel, The People of the Trees. The
novel received widespread praise and was named one of the best books of 2013.
Hanya was born in
Los Angeles to a Hawaiian father and a Korean mother. Due to her father’s occupation, she lived in
several locations, including New York, Baltimore, California, and Texas. She began writing travel pieces for Conde Nast Traveler. In 2015, she became a deputy editor of The New York Times Style Magazine. People
of the Trees is based on the true story of a virologist Daniel Carleton
Gajdusek [Guy-dah-shek].
A. Norton Perina was
a mediocre medical student who faced graduation with almost no opportunities to
further his medical education. One of
his professors connected him to a renowned anthropologist, Paul Tallent, who
believed he could locate an unknown tribe in a south Pacific Island. He wanted to bring Norton along so that he
could asses the medical condition of the tribe.
He discovered a rather inexplicable paradox of the tribe members on one
of the three islands which made up the tiny archipelago – the people appeared
to be in their early 60s, yet evidence dictated some of the islanders were more
than 200 years of age. Norton becomes
obsessed with finding the cause of their longevity. In later years, he began adopting abandoned,
malnourished children. He brought more
than four dozen of these children to the United States and provided them with
healthcare and education. His study of
the people on one of the islands in the U’iva chain, Ivu’ivu, gained him a
Nobel Prize in 1974. This closely
parallels the life and work Gajdusek, who worked among alleged cannibals of New
Guinea in the 50s and 60s. He adopted
numerous children, brought them to the US, and he also won a Nobel Prize in
1976.
As was the case in A Little Life, the prose is absorbing
and interesting, but People of the Trees never
comes near the level of violence and horror of her second novel. The novel is actually a memoir of Perina
written during a twenty-four month stretch in Prison.
A colleague, Ronald
Kubodera, urges Norton to set the facts of his life down in a memoir, and he
agrees on the condition Kubodera will edit the manuscript. On his first of many trips to Ivu’ivu, Norton
describes the island. Hanya writes, “As
we made the half-hour ride toward town, I learned of all the things U’iva did
not have. There were no roads, for one –
trails, yes, with patches of grass and struggling flowers tamped down by horses
hooves – nor was there a hotel, or university, or grocery store, or
hospital. There were, dismayingly,
churches, quite a few of them, their white wooden spires the only thing taller
than the palm, which cast stripes of black shadow against the dirt but offered
no comfort from the sun, which washed the sky a hard glaring white. I asked Tallent – who was managing to look
graceful on his small horse – if there were many horses on the island but it
was his [research assistant] who answered, telling me that although a hundred
or so had made their way to U’ivu in the early 1800s, most of them had died in
a terrible tsunami that had destroyed the northern half of the island in
1873. The rest returned home soon after,
and U’ivu was once again left to the U’ivuans, the way it had been for the
thousands of years prior to the missionaries’ arrival” (100-101).
Interestingly,
Kubodera weighs into the story with a series of footnotes explaining,
correcting, and questioning some of what Norton writes. For example, when one of the islanders is
taken to the sea shore, they were mystified.
He explains, “Astonishingly, the villagers were not only not familiar
with the sea, they had no notion of it at all.
There is an account by Tallent of a villager being taken to see the sea
for the first time and his mistaking it for ‘a sky without clouds.’ The poor man thought the world had been typed
upside down and that he was entering the world of Pu’uaka, goddess of the
rains. See Paul Tallent, ‘The Island
without Water: Ivu’ivuan Mythology and Isolationism,’ Journal of Micronesian Ethnology (Summer 1958, vol. 50, 115-32)”
(209). Hanya cleverly weaves facts into
this marvelous fictive work.
Hanya Yanagahara has
created an imaginative world in The
People of the Trees. This absorbing,
provocative story exams the devastation of cultures by outsiders, while
providing a prelude to the problem of evil found in A Little Life. 5 stars.
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