Thank you all who have been reading these reviews over the past
five-plus months! Your subscriptions mean a lot to me. I've decided to
take a break for the summer to do other kinds of reading, specifically
research for a historical novel I'm working on (and as fascinating as a book like Styrian Witches in European Perspective is to me as an ethnographic study of modern witchcraft beliefs in rural Slovenia, I’ll admit that it’s also a bit dense). I imagine some of you might also not mind having the break to catch up on your own reading. So, this will be my last post for a while, but I’ll start up again in September.
Since I got a lot of positive responses to my review of Kent Haruf's Plainsong and his last published novel, Our Souls at Night, has such strong summer vibes, I thought this might be a good book to send you off with for the summer. This short, 2015 novel is technically not one of the Plainsong trilogy, but nevertheless set in the same fictional town of Holt, Colorado and has a similar plainspoken style and tone but a narrower character palette. It's a gentle, bittersweet story of friendship and love between widowed neighbors, Louis Waters and Addie Moore.
One day, at the age of seventy, Addie approaches Louis with a rather unconventional question: would he be interested in coming over at night and sharing her bed-not as a romantic relationship but simply for the company in the darkest and loneliest hours of night? A retired schoolteacher, Louis is initially concerned about the risk of town gossip, but Addie persuades him that they are too old to let other people's perceptions influence them. In the early going, they must also navigate their own hesitations and awkwardness and sift through their complicated pasts, involving Louis's infidelities to his wife, who was a friend of Addie's, and the tragic death of Addie's daughter.
Once these initial tensions are resolved, the story opens up into a long, mostly idyllic summer wherein Addie and Louis's biggest challenge involves figuring out how to incorporate Addie's grandson into their lives after her son's marriage fails and he brings the boy to stay with Addie. While I deeply enjoyed this section of the book, I did find myself surprised by the relative lack of macro-level narrative tension—especially compared to Plainsong—and wondered how the book could possibly resolve in a satisfying dramatic arc. About three-quarters through, however, the book takes a sudden turn into a emotionally complex ending in which the question of whether they will allow the opinions of others to impact their relationship is revisited in a heart-wrenching but deeply believable way. In the end, it's quite a different reading experience from Plainsong but no less insightful or poignant in its portrayal of the main characters.
While I understand this book has been remade into a well-reviewed Netflix miniseries, I alas cannot comment on the adaptation since I haven’t had the chance to watch it. I can, on the other hand, strongly recommend the audiobook version, narrated by Mark Bramhall, which felt like the perfect way to experience the book's quiet, unhurried plot over a span of just three and a half hours.
Hope you all have a wonderful summer of reading, and I’ll see you back here in September!
Have a wonderful summer. I will be doing same thing but still writing. Good fortune and fun . Sending little hugs