|  | Author: Elizabeth Strout
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
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Seller: treebeardbooks
Rating:  280 reviews
Sales Rank: 72
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
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
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Showing reviews 6-10 of 280
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
3 out of 3 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 2 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.
 Graet Read! November 11, 2009
needypen (nevada city, ca.)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
i was so entertained by this novel. I think everyone can relate to some aspect of the lead character, Olive Kitteridge.
At times it is so emotionally and incredibly moving- she will make you squirm for being so uncomfortably blunt, laugh out loud for her audacity and cry for her painful and embarrassing moments. The novel taps deep into the humanity in each and everyone of us.
 "Love was not to be tossed away carelessly." November 11, 2009
E. Bukowsky (NY United States)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Elizabeth Strout's "Olive Kitteridge" is a compilation of thirteen stories, all set in rural Maine. The various tales touch on a variety of characters who are loosely connected by their somewhat tenuous relationship with Olive Kitteridge. Olive is a crusty, judgmental, and blunt woman who was a much feared teacher in the local middle school for thirty-two years. She is married to mild-mannered Henry, a kindly pharmacist who prides himself on catering to each customer's needs and adding a personal touch to every transaction. In the first and possibly the best chapter, Strout focuses on Henry's friendship with his new assistant, Denise, a sweet and personable newlywed who is as solicitous of Henry's customers as he is. Olive dismisses Denise as a simpleton and "the plainest child I have ever seen." Actually, Denise is extremely bright and capable, but Olive's sour disposition and tunnel vision keep her from assessing people objectively. She never hesitates to unleash a stream of invective whenever the mood strikes her.
Other chapters feature many unhappy individuals, such as an alcoholic pianist who is involved with a married man; a despondent psychiatrist in training; an aging gentleman who longs for physical and emotional companionship; a mentally ill woman who rarely leaves her home; a grieving widow; and a girl who is jilted on her wedding day. Does this sound extraordinarily depressing? Well, it is. Although Strout has a smooth literary style and great compassion for the world's outcasts, her stories (which were written over a number of years) lack cohesion. We no sooner become invested in one character when he or she disappears into the ether. Olive, Henry, and her son do return, but their reemergence does nothing to relieve the novel's gloom.
"Olive Kitteridge" is about missed opportunities, lack of communication, bad luck, psychological distress, loneliness, and regret. The author heartbreakingly explores the defenses that we erect in order to protect ourselves from facing the truth. Unfortunately, no matter how hard we try to hide from ourselves, sooner or later we must take a long, hard look in the mirror. Strout's protagonists have a number of bitter pills to swallow: Their children resent them. Their marriages have become monotonous and unsatisfying. As they get older, they have nothing to look forward to except decrepitude and death. At one point, someone says, "To love and be loved is the most important thing in life." Unfortunately, those who have no family, friends, or satisfying work may be destined to spend their days alone and forlorn. Nature is oblivious to our suffering: "The tulips died, the trees turned red, the leaves fell off, the trees were bare, [and] snow came." As the seasons change and time passes, we have little choice but to endure whatever lies ahead. Those lucky individuals who are buoyed by religious faith, a sense of community, close relatives, and kind acquaintances may be able to avoid the frustration and sterility that make Strout's bleak landscape so forbidding.
Showing reviews 6-10 of 280
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