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‘Winter Light’: exalted sequel

11 years ago ‘Olive Kitteridge’But it’s only been a month since Olive and Jack Kennison shared a bed. The passage of time is one of the themes that, ‘sotto voce’, resonates in this excellent novel which is, again, a collection of stories that have a compact tone, united by a ‘dramatis personae’ that seems to breathe in the same vein as its prequel. Between chapter and chapter, what happens? How do the days, the months, fall from the armchair of the calendar? Elizabeth Strout think of the town of Crosby, Maine, as one of those microcosms that American literature has loved so much since Sherwood Anderson published “Winesburg, Ohio.” In the center, the loving relationship that is being consolidated between these two gray-haired widowers and hungry for hugs. In the surroundings, a lot of surprising characters who yearn to belong, love and feel: a piano student who is desired by the eyes of an old man, a pregnant woman who gives birth after a ridiculous ‘baby shower’, a hostile daughter-in-law that, suddenly, she has an outburst of generosity (or is it the other way around: she cannot avoid the fact of punishing her husband, even humiliating him, in front of the mother-in-law she hates?).

And at the top, a larger-than-life woman, frank to the point of being offensive, noble and trustworthy like a hundred-year-old tree, rugged and rugged, but also warm and supportive, that Olive Kitteridge we imagine with her face and skinny pout. Frances McDormand. Strout’s style is reminiscent of his admired Alice Munro, though it is more (falsely) prosaic. In the Canadian writer it still seems that words can be broken, they are so delicate and vulnerable and exposed to love and suffering. In Strout’s literature there is a familiarity, an affection, which, like Olive, melts her grief, her grief, her frustration to give way to empathy. Here Olive is over 70 years old, and begins to think about her own death with the fear of someone who has pretended not to have it. There is something heroic about Olive’s desire to connect with her fellow human beings, even in a nursing home. A way of admitting that we are mortal, and that the only thing that can save us from our ghosts is our connection with the other.

Goddess of the everyday

The emotional depth This sublime sequel is measured unpretentiously, with an astonishing naturalness, as if writing were an inevitable gesture of vital expression, a gesture almost as worthy as that of the lives of these characters that you have to know how to look at to document their majesty. , often invisible and silent. Then Olive stands in a goddess of the everyday, a woman who, in her paradoxical existence, in her contradictory way of relating to the world, awakens love and irritation in equal measure. In a moment of ‘Winter light’, Cindy, a former librarian and inveterate reader, affirms that poets are the right hand of God. Reading Strout, one gets the impression that some prose writers are his left hand.


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