![]() ![]() There is a tenderness to this title, too: the intimacy of first-name terms. The later decades of ageing show the conflict between the security of a stubborn fidelity to the person you have been all these years, and the fear (as loved ones are lost, and the experiences of a life begin to be totalled) at what you may have missed. ![]() This is, however, increasingly a softened, vulnerable version of her, aware that her gruffness might cause hurt. An indomitable character, Olive continues to be vitally herself: “She stood there, staring at the ridiculous lampshade with its ruffled business going on”. There might be something apologetic in the announcement “again” (self-consciously repetitious), but it also communicates the idea of a determined carrying on. Via 13 interlinking short stories, Strout refracts glimpses of her eponymous character Olive, a retired maths teacher and irascible pharmacist’s wife.įrom its title alone, Olive, Again suggests some of the changes we can expect to see in Strout’s unsentimental, blunt, but highly compassionate protagonist. ![]() Olive, Again follows ten years on the heels of her Pulitzer Prize-winning “novel in stories” Olive Kitteridge, which painted a resonant, emotionally complex portrait of a community in fictional Crosby, a small coastal town in Strout’s native Maine. Much as her stories are interested in subtlety – the quiet complications and contradictions of ordinary life – her books advertise themselves by means of telling understatements. ![]()
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