This is a lovely collection and a depressing one. Strout is an excellent writer, with a great eye for nuance of character and feeling. But particularly in her short story collections, she seems drawn to quiet, deep sadness, to loneliness and unvoiced pain and marriages that fail their participants. This collection of linked stories – roughly every other story is about the title character, while the others focus on people she knows – features an older woman slowly losing her husband to medical problems, after they’ve lost and failed each other repeatedly over the years despite their love for one another. So expect a melancholy read.

But at the same time, it’s a great book. Strout is an expert crafter of characters, and I loved reading about the prickly, complex Olive. The stories about other people from her small town in Maine are also quite good, and allow the author a wider range for experimentation (I’m not sure I ever fully unpacked the subtly disturbing “Criminal”), though I would’ve appreciated getting some follow-up on these characters in the later entries. Especially at the beginning, I preferred the stories that covered a longer span of time (such as the phenomenal first story, “Pharmacy”) to the more compressed ones (“Incoming Tide” fell flat for me). Toward the end I was reading it more like a novel, and most interested in getting back to Olive rather than the one-off stories of other townspeople. At times I avoided reading it because it is so often sad, but it’s a great literary collection and one I could see myself returning to one day, there’s so much insight and humanity in it.

Also, the imaginative piece at the end, in which the publisher “interviews” Strout and Olive together, is creative and hilarious – definitely an achievement in supplementary material.

Di solito non leggo raccolte di racconti perché una volta terminato uno, poi passano giorni, a volte anche settimane, prima che riprenda in mano il libro.  Questo libro ne contiene quattordici e mi ha accompagnato per quindici giorni; ho più o meno mantenuto il mio obiettivo di leggerne almeno uno al giorno.

Olive Kitteridge è un libro un po' malinconico fatto di tanti racconti riguardanti ciascuno un abitante o una famiglia della città . Olive vive a Crosby, un'anonima cittadina del Maine, è un'insegnate di matematica dal carattere piuttosto brusco ma non cattivo.

Il libro ha una vera e propria struttura cronologica da cui si ricava la vita e il modo di ragionare di Olive Kitteridge. A volte di un racconto è  la protagonista, a volte coprotagonista o comparsa, a volte semplicemente viene ricordata o menzionata dal protagonista. E' stato proprio questo mostrare la protagonista in frammenti, come se stessi ricostruendo un puzzle, ad affascinarmi del libro, oltre alla scrittura netta e asciutta che, nelle poche pagine di ciascun racconto, è stata capace di tratteggiare storie di grande impatto emotivo.

Olive Kitteridge is an extraordinary book. I had to read the first story quite a few times to get into the characters and get what Strout wanted to do here. The writing is gorgeous. It must have required considerable effort and discipline to compile the selection of related and yet unrelated stories - all of which involve either Olive Kitteridge or people in her community in a small town in Maine - and yet keep the tone of the stories so even, so understated.

There were two aspects of Olive Kitteridge that fascinated me most - and that are inevitably what makes or breaks this book for me:

For one, the book focuses on  people in the later stages of life. Mostly. It was great to read about characters who were not going through any rites of passage or growth.

Hand in hand with this, however, came a sort of bleak realism that made it sometimes difficult to read the stories. It was the sort of realism that does not promise happy endings, and acts as a reminder that reality is often far removed from the hope and dignity which is lent to characters in stories.

I was not sure at first whether I liked or disliked this book, and to some extent I still am not sure about this, but I am glad I have read it.

Huh???

That's quite a turn of events.

I don't know.

There is something compelling about this book. It is really well written and the characters just come to life on every page, but oh my is this depressing....