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Olive Kitteridge - July 2021 Book Group discussion thread

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LindsD Jul 2021 7:16pm, 21 Jul 2021 48,572 posts	Quote Pin LindsD
Diogenes Jul 2021 7:22pm, 21 Jul 2021 61,537 posts	Quote Pin Diogenes Ha!
McGoohan Jul 2021 7:46pm, 21 Jul 2021 49,889 posts	Quote Pin McGoohan O Live, Kitteridge. See, works for the first book as well with the bonus that it can be addressed to Olive or Henry.
GregP Jul 2021 7:56pm, 21 Jul 2021 128,188 posts	Quote Pin GregP ~sigh~
Hanneke Jul 2021 10:26pm, 21 Jul 2021 76,704 posts	Quote Pin Hanneke I jave just started reading it, having finished last month's this afternoon. So far so good!
Peregrinator Jul 2021 11:14am, 25 Jul 2021 892 posts	Quote Pin Peregrinator Olive Kitteridge - Elizabeth Strout While I can't condone spoilers in the Book Group, GregP's comment "I have read 509 pages of Olive Sprouts, and have reached page 97" was brilliant. Exactly where I'd got to. But it clearly is "distinguished fiction about American life" and I thought I'd better read the remaining 735 pages of this short novel ((c) McGoohan). And I am probably glad I did. It’s a collection of short stories circulating around Olive, which collectively are intended to paint a picture of middle class, middle aged life in middle America. I wasn't even sure initially when it was intended to be set: the 1970's? Then there are references to the twin towers and mobile phones, which make it much more recent. And I didn't get a sense of Olive's essential core being unpicked: her character and behaviour seemed inconsistent and fragmented to me. She seems to behave differently to different people at different times: but maybe that is the point. It’s not even that nothing happens: there are hold-ups in Hospitals, relationships that are revealed, people kill themselves. But somehow the overall tone dampens down any drama. There didn't seem to be any crucial point where characters came to a realisation about their lives or relationships. It’s a novel where one of the characters could tell another that their father was a prominent Nazi who escaped to the US after the war, and the other would say "Oh, but you don't speak German then?". Maybe that is what would happen in real life. My complaint about The Five People You Meet in Heaven was that it reduced life to a series of fridge magnet quotes. The fridge magnet maxim for this novel might be "People are peculiar, and then they die". But the quote would be well written in lots of words, which wouldn't fit on the side of your fridge.
Peregrinator Jul 2021 11:49am, 25 Jul 2021 893 posts	Quote Pin Peregrinator Reading back: Are we allowed to mention having liked Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon stories in polite company now? A big part of those was him reading them. Maybe I'll have to train my inner voice before reading Olive again. Not sure I ever felt very compassionate towards Olive either. Interesting that a number of people found it improved a lot after slow start - probably took some time to ease down from our Manhattan cool-as-ice city slickers expectations. Winning the Pulitzer prize only nets you $10,000 - wouldn't cover the champagne bill at the night club.
Johnny Blaze Jul 2021 11:54am, 25 Jul 2021 25,484 posts	Quote Pin Johnny Blaze Finished it a few days back. Overall I liked it but I felt it was quite "slight", although that may be the point. Olive was a big-boned, difficult woman who didn't quite come alive as a character to me. If she was English she would probably be described as "a no-nonsense individual". Hard to like someone like that. Basically she was Anne Widdecombe without the burning Protestants mindset.
GregP Jul 2021 6:20am, 26 Jul 2021 128,259 posts	Quote Pin GregP Loved the fridge magnet comment. Very nicely done. Lake Woebegone is absolutely a reasonable thing to raise. I’m minded to mention John Cheever too.
Columba Jul 2021 9:16pm, 26 Jul 2021 21,197 posts	Quote Pin Columba I enjoyed this; though less so, as I went along. It took me some time to realise that there wasn't really going to be a plot, as such. Not that that necessarily distressed me. The next thing I realised was that many of the chapters could have been stand-alone short stories. And then I noticed from the title page that actually many of them were originally stand-alone short stories. For some reason this made me feel a bit cheated. As a portrait of a small town in Maine, I liked it. I also liked Olive herself, though I could quite see why many of the other characters didn't.