RasoirJ's Book Notes: Olive Kitteridge

Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout (2009) (Rating = 5 = I loved it)

Elizabeth Strout’s marvelous story collection/novel makes a quiet, unpretentious splash. It’s a book of 13 short stories, some intertwined and many featuring Olive Kitteridge as the protagonist. What I like best:

• The very credible portraits of real people in a real place, a small town on the Maine coast.

• Strout’s ability to limn the complex, ambivalent emotions of aging among longtime married couples. The stories are filled with longing, loss, accommodation – and the power of deeply sublimated feelings.

• Strout’s facility as a prose stylist, the way she repeatedly comes up with the memorable phrase salted into the right spot.

• The character of Olive – a big woman, physically and emotionally. She’s angry, tough, blunt, stoic, donut-eating, and while not always very self-aware, always a fully rounded human. Whether or not you can appreciate Olive is a good gauge of whether I’ll be able to be a good friend of yours.

QUOTES:

On a young woman in “Incoming Tide; “…she was lovely, the way a sapling might be as the afternoon sun moved over it.”

Olive in “A Little Burst” on why her grown son doesn’t have many friends: “He is like her in that way, can’t stand the blah-blah-blah.”

Olive at her son’s wedding: “They probably think they’re through with loneliness too.”

RasoirJ's Movie Notes: The Ghost Writer

The Ghost Writer (2010) director: Roman Polanski (Rating = 4 = I liked it a lot)

Polanski is a great filmmaker, and he’s in top form here. He knows how to keep the suspense churning and your brain working as his everyman (Ewan McGregor as the intrepidly clever ghost writer) unravels a chain of conspiracy that begins with his assignment to ghost the autobiography of an ex-Prime Minister, a Tony Blair-like charmer played by Pierce Brosnan. Delicious acting turns by Brosnan, Olivia Williams as his livid, neglected wife and counselor, Tom Wilkinson as a shady Harvard professor with great connections, and 94-year-old Eli Wallach as a Martha’s Vinyard hermit with a vital bit of information. This is a movie about atmospherics, and Polanski turns it into the grayest, rainiest movie I’ve ever seen. The isolated Vinyard beach house setting in winter (really a North Sea beach house) nicely mirrors the mood of foul doings in high places.