Robin Black's fiction and essays have appeared in such publications as One Story, The Southern Review, The Best Creative Nonfiction, Vol I (WW Norton 2007) and can be found in the Summer 2009 issue of Colorado Review. Her first collection of short stories is forthcoming from Random House in 2010.
Here on Isak, Black brings a writer's mind to her recent reading Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout, which was this year's winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. The book is a collection of thirteen linked short stories.
By Robin Black
Guest Writer
In the interest of not burying the headline, I’ll start by saying that Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge,
quietly stunning, masterfully crafted, buoyed by wisdom, is one of the
best books I have read in many a year. I finished it abuzz with the
tell-tale jealousy response, the feeling as a writer that one might as
well just give up because really, with other people producing books
this good, what exactly is the point? It’s a feeling that if you’re
lucky eventually transforms into a mix of gratitude that such books
exist and determination to get there one day yourself--all still tinged
with jealousy of course.
The book is so seamlessly excellent that it’s difficult to choose aspects for praise or even pull out distinct elements for analysis, but certainly part of what distinguishes Olive Kitteridge is the unassuming nature in which it cloaks its brilliance. It is decidedly not a flashy book. There is no odd eye-catching concept here and no high drama, really. One story, “A Different Road,” comes close to something like that, when in the opening lines the narrator discloses that “an awful thing” has happened to the book’s title character and her husband and that neither Kitteridge has been the same since. Not too surprisingly given the hints, the “awful thing” turns out to be that they were victims of a crime, and the assumption of the town folk is that the changes are the natural result of that. But the reader is quickly pulled back into the book’s accustomed world of quiet revelation with the understanding that it was not the high drama of being held at gunpoint that so deflated and saddened them both. It was the unspeakable--now spoken--things they said to one another while thinking that they might die.
Thank you for information!
:)
Posted by: Sharon | August 15, 2009 at 06:50 PM