If you have ever lived in a small town, where everyone knows everyone and everyone knows everyone’s darkest secrets, then Amgash, Illinois and its cast of characters will seem really familiar to you. In a series of short stories, Elizabeth Strout moves from one character to another — most of the time the people in the tales being told are linked by blood or friendship, and so over the course of about a year, the lives of Strout’s characters weave together, with Strout checking back […]
“Lonely was the first flavor I had tasted in my life, and it was always there, hidden inside the crevices of my mouth, reminding me.”
Elizabeth Strout’s Anything is Possible is on the short list of a Goodreads Choice Award but it had a waitlist at my library so I picked up My Name is Lucy Barton instead and was pleasantly surprised. “My mother told me in the hospital that day that I was not like my brother and sister: “Look at your life right now. You just went ahead and…did it.” Perhaps she meant that I was already ruthless. Perhaps she meant that, but I don’t know what my […]
Beautiful writing; bleak material
This is the second Elizabeth Strout book that I’ve read (the other being Olive Kitteridge), and while I cannot deny her gift as writer, I just do not enjoy her novels. The biggest issue is, she doesn’t seem to want them to be enjoyable. Like Kitteridge, The Burgess Boys is filled with unpleasant characters and terribly sad events. “You have family”, Bob said. “You have a wife who hates you. Kids who are furious with you. A brother and sister who make you insane. And a nephew who used to […]
“All these lives,” she said. “All the stories we never know.”
This book apparently won a ton of awards, and people online rave about Olive. I actually thought she was kind of a dick, and the book would have been much better without her. “But here they were, and Olive pictured two slices of Swiss cheese pressed together, such holes they brought to this union—what pieces life took out of you. Her eyes were closed, and throughout her tired self swept waves of gratitude—and regret. She pictured the sunny room, the sun-washed wall, the bayberry outside. It […]
Portrait of an Ordinary Woman
Olive Kitteridge is a book about folks in Crosby, Maine, basically a collection of short stories that amount to a (light) novel. Each story is about someone in Crosby, Maine–sometimes Olive is the main character, and sometimes she makes an appearance as a supporting character or even in someone’s memory. Olive is a sourpuss middle-aged lady, big-boned and no-nonsense. She’s described by different characters as scary, large, imposing, and she knows these things about herself with a kind of partial self-awareness that felt extremely familiar. […]