Rating: 4/5
Review:
Very good but not perfect
There are brilliant things about Olive Kitteridge, but as a whole
book I didn’t think it was quite as fantastic as many people have
done.
Elizabeth Strout is
a very fine writer; her prose is beautifully unfussy while being
occasioanlly strikingly beautiful, she creates excellent, complex,
human characters and her portraits of them are penetrating, humane
and very memorable. These things are evident in abundance in these
13 linked short stories, all involving Olive Kitteridge either as a
major protagonist or as a tangential character. Strout conjures
wonderful characters in a small New England town and Olive herself is
complex, direct, flawed and fascinating, all of which kept me
reading, often with great enjoyment.
Overall, though, I
found the structure a bit hard to take. Its fragmented nature and
loose chronology felt a little mannered sometimes and robbed the book
of the real depth of My Name Is Lucy Barton, for example. It’s
still a very fine book, but for me not quite the masterpiece it’s
often cracked up to be. I can recommend it, but not quite
wholeheartedly.
No comments:
Post a Comment