Our Souls at Night

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Average customer rating 4.2 (5 comments)

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Although OUR SOULS AT NIGHT appears to be a quick read because it is a short book, it is not. That is, the book seems much longer than it is. Even a slow reader like me should be able to finish such a short book in less than a day. But no. I looked for excuses to put it down. The end did not come soon enough. OUR SOULS AT NIGHT has an interesting beginning. Addie proposes to her neighbor, Louis, that they keep each other company in bed at night. From there, the book continues: something happens, then something else happens, then something else happens, then something else happens, etc. It’s not much of a story. But the story does seem to try to anger the reader a couple of times. Instead, though, I was angry with the author for writing such ridiculousness: Addie’s and Louis’s adult children reprimanding them, both in their 70s, for wanting to be together at night. RIDICULOUS! To make matters worse, Haruf uses punctuation marks sparingly and quotation marks not at all. Why do some authors do that, regress to the time before people thought readability was important enough to invent those marks? I usually read for enjoyment. Reading this book was too much work.

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A simple, outstanding read!! Wonderful characters who portray the aging process and its all too human concerns. Very highly recommended.

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A beautifully written story of two lonely widowed neighbors looking for companionship. The book has one of the best opening sentences ever and it captured my heart immediately. Within minutes I felt as though I knew Addie and Louis personally. I wanted to jump into the book and join their lives in Holt County.

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Addie Moore has been widowed for years. Her only son and his family live out of town. She keeps fairly active but she’s lonely. So one day, out of the blue, she calls a neighbor. Louis Waters, a retired high school English teacher, lost his wife years ago. His only daughter lives out of town as well. Since Addie and Louis live in Holt, Colorado, the setting of all of Kent Haruf’s unembellished novels, where people tend to create makeshift families, they won’t be alone all the time in his final novel, Our Souls at Night. The worst part of being alone, Addie tells Louis, is there is no one to talk to at night. So what does he think about coming over to spend the same night, to sleep in the same bed, no obligations, no sex? Well, Louis thinks about it. And he heads over. Their unorthodox relationship has some in town buzzing and others cheering. But Addie says she’s way past worrying about others and it’s time Louis did the same: "I told you I don’t want to live like that anymore -- for other people, what they think, what they believe. I don’t think it’s the way to live. It isn’t for me anyway." Over the course of a summer, they tell each other secrets and stories from their lives, secure that neither will judge the other harshly or wrongly. This includes a huge mistake Louis made and still regrets. He also believes that mistake says something about his character. It’s not something he wishes for his own daughter. He wishes the opposite for her: "I wish you would find somebody who’s a self-starter. Somebody who would go to Italy with you and get up on a Saturday morning and take you up in the mountains and get snowed on and come home and be filled up with it all." When Addie’s young grandson is sent to spend the summer with her, because his parents are fighting, Louis adds wonderful experiences to the child’s world -- watching a nest of newborn mice, learning how to play catch, going camping and having a dog. Trouble could come from many sources -- their ages, their children, even changing feelings. When trouble does arrive, it is infuriating, all the more because it is entirely plausible. Family members don’t always wish the best, and only the best, for each other. This seems especially true when past hurts become deeply ingrained grudges. Some people just don’t get over things. They let their hurts fester until their souls are poisoned. And then, sometimes, they try to infect others with the same venom. Even the people who love them. Haruf gets this across calmly, quietly, letting the characters and their actions speak for themselves without much exposition. This narrative style may seem too quiet and nondescript for some. But when the emotional wallops come, they are all the stronger for the lack of hyperbole. In this, his final novel, Haruf also has a grand meta moment when Addie and Louis talk about dramatic adaptations of stories set in their town by some writer. But they couldn’t be true. They’ve lived in Holt for years and never heard about two old bachelor brothers who took in a young pregnant woman. For readers such as this one, who have adored Haruf’s novels since that story, Plainsong, it was a sweet moment of farewell

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Kent Haruf never disappointed his readers. To anyone reading his books for the first time, let me assure you that Mr. Haruf knew his settings and characters very well. We are all better for having the pleasure of knowing him, if only through his books. Please read all of them.