Not everyone will be taken into the future – Newspaper Kommersant No. 52 (7497) dated 03/28/2023

A new novel by the American writer Hanya Yanagihara, “Until Heaven,” has been published in Russian. Perhaps in 2023 this is the most uncomfortable text for a modern society firmly obsessed with big ideas. Yanagihara, with unparalleled severity, shows to what extent, for all the importance of these concerns, the result of our attention to them is relevant to the world in which we exist. And, as in Yanagihara’s previous books, the author is not opposite the reader, but on his side, whatever he may be. This anthropology, I’m sure Dmitry Butrinand there is what Yanagihara considers the only way not to change the world for the better, but to move somewhere in the direction that corresponds to our nature.

Hanya Yanagihara’s new novel, surprisingly quickly and efficiently translated by a team of translators for the publishing house Corpus, by its very design is capable of perplexing any reader: why is she doing this? Do not concentrate on anything, take at once everything that may be of interest to the one looking at the bookshelf – an alternative history plus literally two centuries old family saga, plus gay rights, plus the specific problems of a class society, plus all the same questions of multiculturalism in a society with a heterogeneous ethnic composition, plus environmental thinking and climate troubles. Plus, finally, post-COVID discussions about the future of medical totalitarianism: you don’t think that COVID-19 was the last pandemic, do you? The year 2096, to which the action of the novel is related, is not as far away as we think, there is something to be afraid of.

Try to imagine the writer’s ambition to cram it all into a single narrative that begins in utterly bland New English with 19th-century intonations, never escalating to modern-day emotional intensity. Although emotions (this is Yanagihara, the author who broke into world literature precisely with the new quality and granularity of the psychological novel in A Little Life in 2015) remain the main thread in the novel All the way to Paradise, the very fabric of the text, the movement of the narrative, is, in general, secondary . With such introductions, in order not to turn this heap of large and, of course, very opportunistic topics into a very common lately ambitious kitsch digest a la modern Chinese science fiction, an exceptional author’s confidence is needed that he is able to deal with all this cope, embrace the immensity and in the end still drink the sea.

The way Hanya Yanagihara handles this is the main thing worth reading the novel for, as it is supremely amazing. After tens of thousands of talented family sagas, go ahead and make it so that no one in their right mind can understand why none – neither geographical, nor genealogical, nor cultural ends of the different parts of this saga will be glued together (since the real family saga is always fictional , this is a product of external consumption, but in reality these are parallel, very rarely intersecting lines of life). In ordinary novels, the actions of the characters are meaningful and explained by the movement of ideas, but how many times have you observed such successful realizations of your plans in relation to yourself? And what will the collapse of hopes mean? Let’s say you decide, like one of the heroes of “To Heaven”, to live the life of ancestors, descendants of powerful Hawaiian kings. And run de facto to the island and there, on the ocean, in a surprisingly colorless – and this is after the brightest, most aggressive nature in Yanagihara’s other novel “People Among the Trees” – the natural environment, live the life that you dreamed of all your life. Does this failure mean that your original idea was vicious, false, wrong?

What will be is rarely determined by your intentions. That’s not even the USA, but just a fictional part of America, in which gay marriages have been the norm since the end of the 18th century, and you can even, following the narrator, try on the feelings of a partner in such a marriage – not thrilled and not horrified, because changing- then social activity requires not only this, but, perhaps, not this at all. In the phantasmagoric alternate reality of the novel, the class of society has not gone away, in this part of North America, a stronghold of gender freedom, unlike conservative and traditional California, arranged marriages arranged by the family, and not by you, are generally accepted. And does it look bad? After all, on your side and on the side of your lack of freedom is the last refuge of all romantics: a house, an old house around which everything revolves for many decades – photographs on the walls, the memory of generations, walls, objects of memory of generations, the place where your beloved grandfather lives. However, suddenly, as it happens, the house, in this case the family nest in New York on Washington Square, at one moment ceases to have any meaning for either the characters or the author. After it is rebuilt, rid of the heritage of two centuries, and at the same time all the beloved grandfathers survive from there, it will suddenly remain the same as it was: an architectural structure of brick and wood.

Or rather, even our usual fetish, the family home, is important and has a meaning, but it is completely different in comparison with what we thought about it. In many ways, Yanagihara’s novel is so perplexed and crumpled, although very abundantly discussed in the United States precisely because of the main idea – ideas that are important to us need to be implemented not because of their brilliant result expected from them, but because they correspond to human nature that makes us move towards the best in our idea of ​​the best, and this is always a very imperfect idea. Heroism, courage, empathy, the ability to love and receive love are good not because they will make the world a better place, but because they are peculiar to us, they are in our nature. Hanya Yanagihara is, first of all, a very talented anthropologist, and this science is impossible without sympathy for what is being studied, for a person, that is, for oneself. The best that we have is not thoughts about the important, but that which is higher than thoughts. This is the human that is at the basis of all the injustices of the world, and it also allows us to move further, towards an unknown and vaguely imagined by us paradise, an area unattainable, but dreamed of by all and desired by all of us.