Elizabeth Strout's Olive, Again only confirms her as one of my favorite contemporary writers of literary fiction.
The temperamental Olive in her later decades demonstrates qualities that only come with experience and self-reflection, enabling her to be an instrument of grace to others. She is still a straight-shooter who sees things unvarnished, her truthfulness sometimes abrasive.
The stories in this book revisit characters from Strout's fictional world of Crosby, Maine.
This was a hard story to read. At age 67, my husband and I have undergone several surgeries this year. I am all too aware of the brevity of life and how we allow ourselves to be propelled through the years impassively until some change in our abilities stops us up short. We reconsider our mistakes; our view of the past and its relationships become torqued with new understanding. We wonder how we could have allowed love to become a battleground, fear to fence us from our dreams. We become invisible, an unwanted portend to others of their own inevitable future. We recognize that we are strangers to each other--and are incomprehensible even to ourselves.
What kind of life can we live in these ever-shortening days? The answer is in the line that had me in tears: "I think our job--maybe even our duty--is to--" Her voice became calm, adultlike. "To bear the burden of the mystery with as much grace as we can."
Life is a mystery. People are a mystery. There are no answers, no easy to follow instructions to guarantee success and happiness.
Like Ranier Maria Rilke wrote in his Letters to a Young Poet, we must "be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked doors and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer."*
I don't know if Olive's story is completed. And I am not sure I want to follow her to her end. It's all too close to home. Strout is a fearless writer who dares to confront us with things that disturb our equilibrium. We recognize ourselves in her characters.
I read a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.
Olive, Again
by Elizabeth Strout
Random House Publishing Group - Random House
Pub Date 15 Oct 2019
ISBN 9780812996548
PRICE $27.00 (USD)
* excerpted from Letters to a Young Poet by Ranier Maria Rilke, translation by M. D. Herter Norton, W. W. Norton & Company
