Olive Kitteridge: Fiction |  | Author: Elizabeth Strout
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
List Price: $14.00
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Seller: treebeardbooks
Rating:  277 reviews
Sales Rank: 55
Media: Paperback
Edition: Reprint
Pages: 304
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.3
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5 x 0.8
ISBN: 0812971833
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780812971835
ASIN: 0812971833
Publication Date: September 30, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
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 of Crosby, Maine, 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 her husband, 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.
Praise for Olive Kitteridge:
“Perceptive, deeply empathetic . . . Olive is the axis around which these thirteen complex, relentlessly human narratives spin themselves into Elizabeth Strout’s unforgettable novel in stories.”
–O: The Oprah Magazine
“Fiction lovers, remember this name: Olive Kitteridge. . . . You’ll never forget her. . . . [Elizabeth Strout] constructs her stories with rich irony and moments of genuine surprise and intense emotion. . . . Glorious, powerful stuff.”
–USA Today
“Funny, wicked and remorseful, Mrs. Kitteridge is a compelling life force, a red-blooded original. When she’s not onstage, we look forward to her return. The book is a page-turner because of her.”
–San Francisco Chronicle
“Olive Kitteridge still lingers in memory like a treasured photograph.”
–Seattle Post-Intelligencer
“Rarely does a story collection pack such a gutsy emotional punch.”
–Entertainment Weekly
“Strout animates the ordinary with astonishing force. . . . [She] makes us experience not only the terrors of change but also the terrifying hope that change can bring: she plunges us into these churning waters and we come up gasping for air.”
–The New Yorker
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 277
 Surprisingly bitter main character November 17, 2009
Judy Gruen (Los Angeles, CA United States)
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
I picked up this book in part because it won a Pulitzer, but I was disappointed. The main character, Olive Kitteridge, is a tense, often-angry woman with no ability to self-censor her thoughts. While main characters need not be perfect, I never really got to like her, though she grows more sympathetic as she grows older. She lacks humor, making it even more puzzling that Strout would choose someone so basically unlikeable as the focus of these stories. Also, while all the stories supposedly have Olive as some sort of focal point, or give her relevance, two only mention her by name, and those stories seem not connected at all to the town of Crosby, Maine, where most of the action takes place. Finally, Olive's slams at former president GW Bush as a "moron" and as someone who looks "retarded" did nothing to further endear her to me, though it probably did some members of the Pulitzer committee. Her bona fides as someone sassy and opinionated were already well-documented; sticking in her political opinions seemed tacked on and irrelevant. What was the point? Three stars for Strout's excellent writing, though.
[...]
 Olive; An Everywoman. November 16, 2009
Kiki (Birmingham, Alabama)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I just loved this book. I can see why it won the Pulitzer. Strout so beautifully shows the many conditions of the human heart, including its pain and its joy.
A collection of short stories, Olive Kitteridge is a large woman in more than one way--thought, word and physical being in her small Maine town of Crosby. While Olive usually makes at least a brief appearance in every story, many of the stories are about her specifically and her life.
Some of the stories are sad, some funny, some heartbreaking all truthful. They are about life, death, aging and disappointment. Like Shakespeare, Elizabeth Strout seems to be able to encompass it all in this beautifully written, slim book. Excellent reading, and hard to put down. I loved it.
Deserved the Pulitzer November 13, 2009
Robert E. Long III (Mount Kisco, NY USA)
This book got Elizabeth Strout the Pulitzer, and I can see why.
A wonderful tapestry of tales told from multiple perspectives, and a distrurbing and honest view of many of the foibles that make people so unpredictable and complex. Read it, you won't be sorry. Like all really great books, it engenders some complex and ambivalent reactions. I found it a bit thick in terms of mental illness, as one example. Overall, though, I found it uplifting, since these are real characters, dealing with real issues; morality, murder, jealousy, insecurity, but ultimately overcoming insecurity, fear and hatred through love.
Autumnal Tints November 13, 2009
F. Brown
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Elizabeth Strout's work, "Olive Kitteridge," is foremost a contemplation of autumn. "Foolish, foolish spring," Olive pouts in the chapter, "River". "For five days it rained. Harsh and heavy- so much for spring. This rain was cold and autumnal..."
"Olive Kitteridge" is a compilation of 13 vignettes, which span over 30 years. The first chapter, "Pharmacy", captures Olive and her husband, Henry, riddled with middle-age anxieties and the demands of raising their young son, Christopher. The stories petal through time, as the Kitteridge family and the community around them grow old and wrestle with life in all its pain and glory. Empty-nesters, waning sexual drives, distempered grandchildren, and nostalgia for youth abound in this collection of portraits about small-town Crosby, Maine.
The protagonist Olive Kitteridge is a hulking, compassionate, strong-minded, and straight-shooting school teacher, who appears in both leading and peripheral roles throughout the book. The effect of the novel's layered portraits, painted from various points of view, is a touching portrayal of a town and its inhabitants.
Crosby unfolds through the fir trees and rocky Maine coast as does Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha out of the burnt-orange clay and swamps of the Mississippi delta. Strout, like Faulkner, uses nuanced prose to weave a quilt colored with the shades of human anguish. To Strout, it is these moments of anguish, and the quiet torrent of ordinary, daily life that surrounds them, which contribute most to the imperfect, sad, and enduring fabric of life in a close-knit community.
In the chapter "Winter Concert" the reader meets the couple of Jane and Bob Houlton. "Because what did they have, except for each other...?" the omniscient narrator concludes. The Houlton's, faced with oncoming winter, are lost. This cliff of anxiety is the product of Bob and Jane, in their 70's, still being married, despite Bob's decade-long affair with a woman down in Florida. "It's that we're running out of time," Jane had said to Bob earlier at the concert. A simple winter concert becomes a personal moment of deep, deep anguish.
Strout's stories capture their autumnal tints with a painterly quality. Through the great restraint of their author, the stories emerge as a tapestry of melancholy, which evoke the muted colors, powerful symbolism, and deep emotion of an Edvard Munch canvas. In the chapter "Incoming Tide," the character Kevin Coulson, contemplates suicide from the driver-side seat of his truck, as he stares out at the ocean. "Through the windshield he saw the waves coming in higher now, hitting the ledge in front of the marina hard enough to send a spray far into the air, the spray then falling back languidly, the drops sifting through shards of sunlight that still cracked its way between the dark clouds."
There is a lot of light splashing through water and glass in "Olive Kitteridge." The light reminds the reader of his or her omniscient point of view. "Look," Strout is saying, "at all the points of view. See what the characters don't." While Olive and the other characters of Crosby are often oblivious to the light, Strout hopes that at least her readers are not.
Elizabeth Strout was born in 1956, so she wrote much of "Olive Kitteridge" when she was in her late 40's. Many of the chapters appeared in "The New Yorker" before their compilation into a book. It is rare for such a touching look at the twilight of life to come from someone still so young. Or is it?
"There was beauty to that autumn air, and the sweaty young bodies that had mud on their legs, strong young men, who would throw themselves forward to have the ball smack against their foreheads; the cheering when a goal scored, the goalie sinking to his knees," Olive thinks in the chapter called "Tulips".
This memory of life in her 40's overwhelms Olive, as she now in her 70's thinks of her husband and his recent stroke. The springy chapter title is juxtaposed to the story's autumnal theme. A reminder that one of the few things we can do in the face of death is plant bulbs. "There were days- [Olive] could remember this- when Henry would hold her hand as they walked home, middle-aged people, in their prime. Had they known at these moments to be quietly joyful? Most likely not. People mostly did not know enough when they were living that they were living it." Strout is today about the age Olive was walking away from that soccer game with Henry. Strout is teaching herself. "Wake up!" she is yelling in her own ear. "Don't wish to be anywhere but here."
When I read Joan Didion's "The Year of Magical Thinking," The Year of Magical ThinkingI can remember telling my mom that she simply must read it. "Not for me," my mother replied. "I guess it hits too close too home." I was twenty-two at the time and my mother in her 50's. Perhaps, it is easier to make sense of autumn from the boughs of spring. Perhaps in autumn the winter blinds us with fear. For in Olive Kitteridge, all the characters seem to march forward, headlong into their existential battles, unaware of their angst.
Although, this makes sense, because a confrontation with death's realities can be a daunting experience. But when experienced through the truth and beauty that unfolds in a book like "Olive Kitteridge," the reader cannot help but to swim to that truth as to a red buoy, glistening in the sea of life as it tumbles under the darkness of twisted logic. Because Strout finds beauty in an ordinary we all know, and unfurls it with masterly restraint, she teaches not only herself, but the reader as well, the bright lessons of autumn.
 Really? A Pulitzer? November 12, 2009
Book Lover
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
I know this book won the Pulitzer Prize and decided to read it with my book club. I was VERY disappointed and felt as though the book was a lot of hype. The story about Olive is potentially interesting but gets completely obscured by the short stories embedded in the book. Each of the shorter stories is made more obscure by the fact that you do not necessarily know the characters beforehand. Confusing and way over hyped.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 277
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