Elizabeth Strout’s novel, “Olive Kitteridge”, is full of those moments that make you to look up, and to soak up the supremacy of what you’ve just read. Olive, a spiky, retired math teacher married to Henry the character we come to know best by the end of the book is a gentle pharmacist and he is better liked than his wife.

In this story of the book there is the hero or the title character lying on her son’s bed after her outdoor wedding, listening to her new daughter in law through the window making fun of the “Olives” dress she has chosen to wear for the wedding. On the other hand there is the child who, whose mother took off, believes that her father has been granted the “soul custody” of her and there is the intelligence, all the way through, that flatten the misery and when the character “Rebecca” assumes, “This can’t be my life” the opportunity, “that inner shaking that makes you moves forward”, can signal when it is slightest anticipated. Though the book is being advertised as “a novel in stories”, in my opinion it is not a novel. As an example “Sherwood Anderson’s” classic “Winesburg, Ohio”, is the book in which a united sequence of delicately experiential stories centering the characters live in a single town but in “Olive Kitteridge” case the location is Crosby, Maine.

The story goes something like this “Olive and Henry” the two characters of this story have one child, an adult son named as, “Christopher”. Olive and Henry build a house for their son near their own when he returns from “Podiatry School”. His parents hope that “Christopher” will marry with a local woman and give them grandchildren, but the woman he marries is a “beast”, in Olive’s opinion convince Christopher to move to San Francisco before divorcing Christopher soon after, “Olive” is happy to think that now her son will move back home, but “Christopher” decides to be in California, and this break his mother’s heart, for Olive, this is like someone has rocked a lobster slamming her in the breastbone”.

“Olive Kitteridge”, is the set of linked stories about a bad-tempered, school teacher in a coastal town in Maine, author, Elizabeth Strout, has won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for fiction is the work of a very mature writer who has many things to express in her future books.

Olive Kitteridge

Olive Kitteridge

Olive Kitteridge