144. Olive Kitteridge: A Novel in Stories ARC – Elizabeth Strout, Random Books, (April 2008), ISBN: (9781400062089), 270p.
Featuring: Olive Kitteridge and various others
Synopsis (from back cover):
With a literary voice that grows more powerful and compassionate with each new novel, accliamed author Elizabeth Strout gives us thirteen rich, luminous narratives centered on a singular and formidable heroine: Olive Kitteridge.
Olive Kitteridge is the complex and often unpredictable town crier, a person who sees into the hearts of others, discerning their triumphs and tradgedies, while not always seeing herself. A retired schoolteacher in a small coastal town in Maine, she plays a leading or subsidary role in many lives, always with a strong and convincing mixture of psycholoical insight and anger, compassion and deep resentment. Around her swirl such characters as a lounge singer haunted by past love; Olive's stoic husband, bounmd to her in a marriage both broken and strong; a young man who aches for the mother he lost - and whom Olive comforts by her mere presence - while her own son feels tyrannized by Olive's overbearing sensitivities. These are penetrating tales of the human soul in need - sometimes despairing, more often redeemed. Elizabeth Strout, in her lambent prose and with profound insight into the human condition, offers us one of modern literature's richest characters.
Comments:
I really don't know what to say about this book. I become downright confused trying to figure out what I felt and thought reading it. I was mailed this ARC copy as part of a book ring... that I joined after making sure it wouldn't be depressing.
But it's difficult to express what I did feel. Sometimes the stories were sad. Sometimes they were sweet. Sometimes both. Olive was so bitter and angry, and yet she could be this comfort and provider of wisdom to others, too. I could wish she would calm down, stop snapping, stop being so angry and negative. Or I could feel proud of her (a fictional character, yeah) that she could help this person or try to help that one. Or I'd feel sad that she was so confused and lost herself... she calls it "hungry."
I read another review that said the the way Olive is shown in so many perspectives allows the reader to see the difference between how we see ourselves and how others see us (paraphrased) - and I suppose I agree with that.
The great gift is the passion for reading. It is cheap [Hah! It most certainly is not!], it consoles, it distracts, it excites. It gives knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is moral illumination. ~ Elizabeth Hardwick
