Old grumpy people 2010-08-24

Reviewer: Maria

This is a book about old grumpy people whining about their lives. All the things you don't want to read about getting old. Skip this one.

Songs of Experience 2010-08-21

Reviewer: M. Fetler

Blake's poem "London" sums it up: "I wander throe' each charter'd street ... And mark in every face I meet, Marks of weakness, marks of woe." Substitute small-town, ingrown, petit bourgeoise Crosby Maine, and you have it.

Strout's lovely phrasing folds in layer upon layer of bitterest irony. For example, a suicidal man, watches a waitress leave a cafe and reflects: "... as she moved toward the dock, he watched her shoulders, the long back, her thin hips as she moved - she was lovely, the way a sapling might be as the afternoon sun moved over it." Only the clinically depressed could so artfully twist the knife.

Love in its many dysfunctional forms is the reader's compass: excess of love, too little love, forbidden love, fear of love, infidelity, jealousy, narcissism, etc. It is love with a wonderful unexpected twist. Strout's maladroit lovers are not cliche, fresh-faced, rash and brash, twenty-somethings. Her lover's are past middle age, retired, twice-burned, fat, angry, fearful and depressed. They are a TV watching, fast-food-eating generation who married in the 1960s, had children in the 70s, retired in the 90s, and are now fading.

Olive Kitteridge, our prickly, self-righteous heroine, finally learns her lesson: "What young people didn't know ... that love as not to be tossed away carelessly, as if it were a tart on a platter with others that got passed around again. No, if love was available, one chose it, or didn't choose it." .... Her eyes were closed, and throughout her tired self swept waves of gratitude - and regret." Regret, because now lonely, she neglected her dead but loyal husband, Henry. Gratitude because in her old age she is having an affair, even though with a man both she and Henry once despised - an Harvard educated republican from New Jersey, who retired to Crosby and disdains the locals. It is advice to the young, from the old, to be disregarded. Thick and bitter irony.

Good book, great for a book club, not on my top list of books I've read 2010-08-20

Reviewer: Kate

Good book, great for a book club, not on my top list of books I've read

Depressing but Poignant [P 2010] 2010-08-20

Reviewer: Miami Bob

In the 1950's and 1960's literature was abound with male midlife or other life crisis characters. Rabbit Angstrom of Rabbit, Run, Julian English of Appointment in Samarra, and many others. This century, the growth of such characters in the feminine gender grows to explain some of the complex frustrations underlying the woman of modern society -- which includes the least loved and most despised option of womanhood: antagonistic children who do not love them.

Olive Kitteridge is such a woman whose personal problems -- those associated with her successfully suicidal father -- erupt into well overnuturing motherhood for her only son. His ultimate result is to become a lad of few words and little love (for her). Alienation of those around her in the small town's confines (of small Maine) in which this novel revolves become the constant echo chamber. She is haunted by her lack of reciving love from those within as well as outsie of her family. Gossip growing on other gossip erupts to become an almost unanimous statement of the town: we love your husband for being the saint to put up with you.

In spite of this truth or these truths, Kitteridge is a success as her son is a podiatrist whose famiy may be eclectic but in apparent good spirits. But he, like most anyone alive on the earth, resolves to leave the confines of the little town in Maine where he must endure being her son and confined by the few hurting feet in its community which couold scarcely deliver a successful practice to him.

While she ages, Olive does learn that the loneliness -- although self created -- is more compounded by her delivery of the antagonist ways to others for decades. She had a good friend -- her husband. But, he precedes her to death or practical death. And, being left without him is the loneliness she suffers as her husband, like most spouses in a good marriage, is more than a love -- he is her best friend. And, we learn again that Olive can succeed. In regard to marriage, she again is a success. It is the others -- those who criticize her -- who are failing and philandering. It is the loss of spouse that erodes her being. These portions of the book remind me so much of the cinema's success with Away from Her.

If you can handle the depressing topic(s) which is (are) well written, read this book. If you want a light read, avoid this book.

But, like somany of the novels of the 1950's amd 1960's which touch upon topics which most would not like to address, this book confronts middle aged syndrome and the latent and patent problems associated with the same. It teaches, but is not didactic. This won a Pulitzer for reason(s).

Olive Kitteridge 2010-08-19

Reviewer: Michelle L. Spencer

I really loved this book. At first it was hard when everyone got their own chapter, but it all came together swimmingly. You grow to care for Olive Kitteridge, (I did, anyway), and it's a quick read. I bought it because Amazon suggested it after I purchased and read "The Help".