From deep America, in the heart of America, Kent Haruf invites us to spend a few days in the particular town of Holt. A magical place created from his powerful imagination and that ends up transcending his work, as a new Macondo USA version.
Because souls, experiences, memories, guilt walk through Holt. With the most efficient and fascinating brushstrokes, we recognize in each protagonist of a new scenario pain, the weight of life, tragedy and hope.
Haruf opens life in the channel, dissects it and makes each character a new cell that awakens the chill. Hypnotism turned into literature, tourism to a place lost in the middle of the vast continent, but that catches our attention like a mysterious light seen from the plane.
And we are about to land in Holt. We are getting ready to collect our bags to spend a few days among its inhabitants. We will enter their houses, we will learn about their vicissitudes, their troubles, that rabid humanity that recovers for the routine the disturbing adventure of living, despite everything.
Kent Haruf's Top Recommended Novels
Us in the night
Characters back from everything, sufficiently charged with guilt and sorrow to achieve that wisdom that removes the trivial and that is capable of awakening the brightness in a place like Holt, exposed to contrasts from the weather but also to the paradox of find yourself in the heart of the United States to pass through a forgotten place even for tourism.
So the people of Holt live in the absence of surprises, with their routines and unbreakable rhythms. That's where Louis and Addie reside. And while the rest of the neighbors indulge in a convenient night's rest, the two of them face the loneliness of their widowhood. It is what it touches. Or not. Because the night Addie decides to visit Louis, a relationship begins that takes advantage of that time suspended in nothingness, between the dreams of the other locals.
Each night is a return to youth for the two protagonists. And Haruf makes sure that his visits make us understand something very important. And it is that beyond the age in which all the deadlines seem expired, there is always the possibility that souls find new places to talk, dance, travel, be surprised and even fall in love. Holt sleeps, Louis and Addie live.
The song of the plain
First installment of the Plains Trilogy. Existence can hurt. Setbacks can provoke that feeling of a world that concentrates a somatized pain every new day. On How Holt People Cope With Grief This is novel The song of the plainby Kent Haruf.
True humanity, as a kind of common conscience in the face of pain, whether it is past or present pain and one's own or another's, is manifested in the lives of some protagonists who offer a heartfelt presentation of the circumstances in which they have had to live. It is about knowing if there can be some compensation against bad luck, against so many evils that threaten the individual once he is unprotected and looks into the abyss of his weakness.
The most curious thing is how the story progresses without giving in to the tragic. Nor is it that it is about presenting heroes capable of overcoming everything. Rather, it is the narration of a vital cadence that always offers a rest, for a teacher with his sick wife and children in the time of mental incapacity to participate in the burden of the world's weight. A very different case is that of the pregnant girl, with an impossible fit in what was always her home.
The morality of some parents can come to repudiate such an affront of love, or of sex at the moment in which one more offspring needs the naturalization of their “sins”. Very different scenarios and in essence very similar. Suffering for a life at odds with dreams, for a routine of sadness. Only, how to put it ... Haruf ends up highlighting a not inconsiderable aspect of the tragedy that living can be.
And it is that sadness has a shadow, an opposite, like everything on this planet. Happiness is always there, even if it is not even glimpsed. It is contradictory, but the greater the quantity of something, the greater the entity acquires what is barely available. Perfect happiness is that parenthesis between bleak pages and pages. Haruf is able to demonstrate it, with the voice of his characters and the construction of his scenarios.
By the end of the afternoon
The second part of the Plains Trilogy. Kent Haruf returns to the assault of the bookstores with this novel that again addresses an intimacy of private lives, suddenly abandoned in the middle of the moor, among the valley of dry tears, which has been the space of his The Plain Trilogy, one of the most beautiful literary compositions of the late author. Again we travel to Holt for this second installment.
An invented place where each inhabitant seems to have a tremendous story to tell, or if not tell, at least manifest through a literary introspection that ends up splashing any consciousness on its most human side. On this occasion the actors are the McPherons and several other inhabitants of this special town, converted into a kind of purgatory in which God tests the resilience, patience and soul of so many characters exposed to the harshest vicissitudes.
It is not that each of the protagonists who are intertwining and branching off the story (while downloading the plot) must face great causes or transcendental blogs. What of the inhabitants of this town supposedly based in Colorado is to face an alienating destiny from the detail of the most empty existence. The space accompanies. Holt is a town where any night owl could come to spend their last days of detoxification after a hectic life, or where the world's most wanted spy could hide from the world.
Holt's days are slow and heavy, as are his sleepless, sleepless nights. And in that, in the detail, in the assumed fatalism, in the tangible feeling of the heavy days that pass one after another with the same pause, cadence and cycle, we discover the anecdotally human, the fundamentally spiritual. It could be thought that Haruf's intention is to present life as an arid place.
But in the same way that a child can occupy his most entertaining hours around an anthill, the inhabitants of Holt cultivate their soul, they investigate its recesses without the peremptory sensation of time. Once you have a slow life ahead of you, sadness, nostalgia, self-denial or solidarity take on a different weight, much lighter, much more in line with a time made up of experiences instead of pressing seconds ...
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The strongest bond
Back in 1984, Kent Haruf had the strange idea of making his homeland and its nondescript inhabitants space for the novel. It is not that more or less things happen in different places because of the mere landscape or because of the idiosyncrasies of the locals. But of course, since you are writing it is always better to be located in an exuberant Maine, like Stephen King. Or looking for something exotic, away from our usual environment to concoct at ease ... The point is that this was his first novel about a place called Holt. A sleepy town where you would never stop if some lover proposed you a crazy night in the ass of the world.
But something extraordinary can also emerge from a strange idea. Because in the midst of the anodyne the only thing left to do is delve into the characters in sickening detail, like voyeurs who long to discover the soul and driving force of routine actions. Because in the end the anomalous thing always happens, the stridency, the unleashed philia or phobia... In that observation, Haruf is a virtuous and patient teacher who presents us with the fascinating way of life of a place where almost nothing ever happens, until it happens and that's it. jumps into the air...
It is the spring of 1977 in Holt, Colorado. Octogenarian Edith Goodnough lies in a hospital bed and a police officer watches her room. A few months earlier, a fire destroyed the house where Edith lived with her brother Lyman, and now she is accused of his murder. One day, a journalist comes to town to investigate the incident and addresses Sanders Roscoe, the neighboring farmer, who, to protect Edith, refuses to speak. But finally it is the voice of Sanders that will tell us his life, a story that begins in 1906, when the parents of Edith and Lyman came to Holt in search of land and fortune, and that will span seven decades.
In this first novel, Kent Haruf takes us to the arduous rural America, a landscape made of ears of corn, grass and cows, starry skies in summer and abundant snow in winter, where there is an indisputable code of conduct, linked to the land and the family, and where this woman will sacrifice her years in the name of duty and respect and then, with a single gesture, claim her freedom. Haruf tells us about his characters without judging them, from the deep trust in the dignity and tenacity of the human spirit that has made his literary voice unmistakable.
