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Set on the coast of Maine, this fantastic Pulitzer Prize winner (2009) is a terrific character study. Olive is an irascible, crabby old lady who is difficult to like. Yet, as her life, marriage, and story play out, her character changes in ways that are wholly believable. This novel runs the gamut of human emotion and delicately exposes the secret inner workings of the human condition. Beautifully written, Olive Kitteridge is a book I didn't much expect to like — but how wrong I was. Recommended by Dianah, Powell's Books at PDX
Synopses & Reviews
Publisher Comments:
In a voice more powerful and compassionate than ever before, New York Times bestselling author Elizabeth Strout binds together thirteen rich, luminous narratives into a book with the heft of a novel, through the presence of one larger-than-life, unforgettable character: Olive Kitteridge.
At the edge of the continent, Crosby, Maine, may seem like nowhere, but seen through this brilliant writer's eyes, it's in essence the whole world, and the lives that are lived there are filled with all of the grand human drama — desire, despair, jealousy, hope, and love.
At times stern, at other times patient, at times perceptive, at other times in sad denial, Olive Kitteridge, a retired schoolteacher, deplores the changes in her little town and in the world at large, but she doesn't always recognize the changes in those around her: a lounge musician haunted by a past romance: a former student who has lost the will to live: Olive's own adult child, who feels tyrannized by her irrational sensitivities; and Henry, who finds his loyalty to his marriage both a blessing and a curse.
As the townspeople grapple with their problems, mild and dire, Olive is brought to a deeper understanding of herself and her life — sometimes painfully, but always with ruthless honesty. Olive Kitteridge offers profound insights into the human condition — its conflicts, its tragedies and joys, and the endurance it requires.
Review:
Elizabeth Strout's new book, Olive Kitteridge, is that hybrid thing: "a novel in stories." She places all her stories in and around a small coastal town in Maine, and she brings the character of Olive Kitteridge onstage in every one, even if only briefly. But what you begin to realize, as these carefully crafted, individual pieces accumulate, is that together they shape the arc of a narrative,... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) and that the narrative is nothing less than the whole of Olive Kitteridge's life. A novel, yes, in stories. Olive is not an easy woman to like. She's prone to sudden, stormy moods; she's often judgmental and angry, quick to voice her many deep resentments. Her son, Christopher, suffers from depression as he struggles to escape his mother's overbearing presence. Impatience, regret and even repugnance run like seams of coal through her marriage to Henry, the good-natured town pharmacist. "'Do you know, Ollie,' he said, looking up, his eyes tired, the skin around them red. 'In all the years we've been married, all the years, I don't believe you've ever once apologized. For anything.' "She flushed immediately and deeply. She could feel her face burn beneath the sunshine that fell upon it. 'Well, sorry, sorry, sorry,' she said, taking her sunglasses from where they'd been resting on top of her head, and putting them back on. 'What exactly are you saying?' she asked. 'What in hell ails you? What in hell is this all about? Apologies? Well, I'm sorry then. I am sorry I'm such a hell of a rotten wife.'" As the 13 stories unfold — each one taking its time, thick with the well-observed details of ordinary lives and the nakedness of inner minds — Olive is revealed to us as a woman wounded, as well as wounding. Her marriage to Henry, we begin to see, has a strong, if slender, vein of love entwined with that coal. And Olive is capable of surprising us with moments of profound compassion and insight — moments that, although surprising, are never less than convincing, as when Olive gets word that a young woman's husband has died: "'Oh, you poor child,' she said, in a voice Henry would always remember — filled with such dismay that all her outer Olive-ness seemed stripped away. 'You poor, poor child.'" These stories are shot through with sorrow and with quiet despair. A cocktail lounge pianist is visited by an old lover, who cruelly whispers the details of a long ago betrayal. A married man and a widow are helpless to stop a young girl from starving herself to death. The peaceful years at the end of a couple's long marriage are overturned by the accidental revealing of a secret. And perhaps most affecting, a man sits in a car staring out at the rocky Maine seacoast, planning his suicide in the town where his mother carried out hers: "He would lie down on the pine needles and put the blanket over him. If it was the man of the house who found him — so what? The woman who had hung the pink impatiens? She wouldn't look for long. But to have a child — no, Kevin could not abide the thought of any child discovering what he had discovered; that his mother's need to devour her life had been so huge and urgent as to spray remnants of corporeality across the kitchen cupboards." Strout has a fine hand on the page. In "Pharmacy," she deftly juggles present and past as she weaves a complicated story through decades, returning every so often to the warp thread of a particular Sunday morning late in Henry Kitteridge's life. A portentous phrase — "And then: On a Monday morning ... " — slips by like the brush of a moth's wing, its full meaning not revealed until pages later. In "Winter Concert," Strout's ear is unerring for the ways people speak of terrible things. "He didn't answer this but only looked at her with his head still back against the headrest, as though he had fallen out of some tree and lay now, unable to sit up, his eyes rolling sideways to look at her with exhaustion and terrible sadness. 'All that matters is you, Janie. She doesn't matter to me. Seeing her — it didn't matter to me. I just did it because she wanted me to.'" There are glimmers of warmth, of human connection, in even the darkest of these stories. Strout's benevolence toward her characters forms a slender bridge between heartbreak and hope, a dimly glimpsed path through minefields of despair. The stifled sorrows she writes of here are as real as our own, and as tenderly, compassionately understood. Molly Gloss is the author of four novels, including, most recently, "The Hearts of Horses." Reviewed by Molly Gloss, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
(hide most of this review)
Review:
"With the deft, piercing shorthand that is her short storytelling trademark, [Strout] takes readers below the surface of deceptive small-town ordinariness to expose the human condition in all its suffering and sadness." Library Journal
Review:
"A perfectly balanced portrait of the human condition, encompassing plenty of anger, cruelty and loss without ever losing sight of the equally powerful presences of tenderness, shared pursuits and lifelong loyalty." Kirkus Reviews
Synopsis:
New York Times bestselling author Strout binds together 13 rich, luminous narratives through the presence of one larger-than-life, unforgettable character: Olive Kitteridge, who offers profound insights into the human condition.
Elizabeth Strout is the author of Abide with Me, a national bestseller and Book Sense pick, and Amy and Isabelle, which won the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize. She has also been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize in England. Her short stories have been published in a number of magazines, including The New Yorker and O: The Oprah Magazine. She is on the faculty of the MFA program at Queens University in Charlotte, North Carolina, and lives in New York City.
Danielle Mosier, October 17, 2010 (view all comments by Danielle Mosier)
This novel is told through a series of short stories or vignettes, some featuring, and some only mentioning the title character, Olive Kitteridge. The shifting perspectives, and web of relationships depicted remind the reader that we are who we are based on the relationships we keep, how we treat each other, how we interact. Sometimes we're blind to the way our actions affect others, even when we're acutely aware of how others' actions affect us.
As ornery and harsh as she is sometimes depicted, the reader gets glimpses of Olive's tenderness... but more than that, we see that Olive is what most people are not: unabashedly honest. She is real in a way that exudes a sense of being alive and present, even if it is not always pleasant. It made me want to be like her, in that way... not that I want to do and say the things she says and does, but that I want to be more genuine.
I also appreciated the very real historical backdrop of the novel. Olive lives in OUR world and time, and recent events impact her, and she has opinions about them (how could she not?).
I'd recommend this book to anyone going through or who has gone through major life events, or as Olive would say, "big bursts."
Was this comment helpful? | Yes | No (3 of 5 readers found this comment helpful)
z-girl44, March 1, 2010 (view all comments by z-girl44)
I did not feel like this book lived up to the ratings and reviews. It was a hauntingly depressing book to read. I do like how Elizabeth Stout set up each chapter as if they were a book of their own, and I like her writing style, But I did not fall in love with any of the characters and felt that each chapter left to many unanswered questions about the secondary characters.
Was this comment helpful? | Yes | No (4 of 8 readers found this comment helpful)
L J Rod, January 22, 2010 (view all comments by L J Rod)
In Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth Strout opens our hearts to a complicated woman and to stories of truth, ugliness, and beauty. Do we love Olive or do we hate Olive?
John Gardner held that fiction has value not just because it entertains and distracts us from out troubles, and not only because it widens our scope and increases our knowledge of people and places, but because it helps us know what we believe, affirms what is noble in us, and leads us to feel uneasy about our limitations.
One thing I'm sure of, the reader won't be the same after reading Olive Kitteridge.
Was this comment helpful? | Yes | No (17 of 32 readers found this comment helpful)
Product details
270 pages
Random House -
English9781400062089
Reviews:
"Staff Pick"
by Dianah,
Set on the coast of Maine, this fantastic Pulitzer Prize winner (2009) is a terrific character study. Olive is an irascible, crabby old lady who is difficult to like. Yet, as her life, marriage, and story play out, her character changes in ways that are wholly believable. This novel runs the gamut of human emotion and delicately exposes the secret inner workings of the human condition. Beautifully written, Olive Kitteridge is a book I didn't much expect to like — but how wrong I was.
by Dianah
"Review"
by Library Journal,
"With the deft, piercing shorthand that is her short storytelling trademark, [Strout] takes readers below the surface of deceptive small-town ordinariness to expose the human condition in all its suffering and sadness."
"Review"
by Kirkus Reviews,
"A perfectly balanced portrait of the human condition, encompassing plenty of anger, cruelty and loss without ever losing sight of the equally powerful presences of tenderness, shared pursuits and lifelong loyalty."
"Synopsis"
by Ingram,
New York Times bestselling author Strout binds together 13 rich, luminous narratives through the presence of one larger-than-life, unforgettable character: Olive Kitteridge, who offers profound insights into the human condition.
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