The case of Elizabeth strout it seems to approach that paradigm of the trade discovered with the vital becoming. The little stories with which so many of us started, those stories adjusted to each moment of childhood or youth...
Somehow the pleasure of writing of someone who once starts writing is never abandoned. Until that day when the vocational notion takes over, that necessary intention to tell stories to exorcise or to ramble with greater dedication, to express a vital declaration of intentions or to expose an ideology formed over the years.
And that's how after forty, the thriving Elizabeth writer version ended up jumping to a preponderant level in that vital dedication. It is true that all this is my speculation, but in some way every writer who appears in mature ages points to that own evolution of creativity conducted parallel to the experience and the final intention of leaving that testimony that is always to tell stories.
Within a realistic and sober style, Elizabeth Strout often provides psychological novels, in the sense that it gives us the opportunity to address that subjective space of the world built on the conditions of the characters that we all are, interacting with our daily lives.
An arduous task in which Elizabeth Strout balances dialogue and thoughts in concise language, with the complexity required to create such subjective settings without falling into psychological pedantry, dogmas or marked intentions.
Elizabeth presents us with souls, the souls of the characters. And we are the ones who decide when they excite us, when they are deeply wrong, when they are missing an opportunity, when they need to shake off guilt or change their perspective. Adventures about the existence of a world built from the prism of absolutely empathetic characters.
Top 3 Recommended Books by Elizabeth Strout
Oh William
Realism sometimes ends up deepening towards a compendium of the crudest existentialism combined with that notion of the subjective nature of each character. A second notion of the plot that sprinkles everything with the fantasy of surviving fears and guilt. Only that achieving that precise balance is in the hands of authors like Strout, capable of tracing what remains of the soul in everyday life. This is how stories like this one arise, where we jump over the walls where William's internal forum is built, and also that of this author's star character Lucy Barton. In both cases the most intimate revelation happens to reach the wildest side of identity, of the secrets that justify our behaviors more than any explanation that can be given in this regard.
Unexpectedly, Lucy Barton becomes a confidant and supporter of William, her ex-husband, the man with whom she has had two adult daughters, but who is now almost a stranger prey to night terrors and determined to reveal his mother's secret.
As his new marriage falters, William wants Lucy to accompany him on a journey from which he will never be the same. How many feelings jealousy, pity, fear, tenderness, disappointment, strangeness fit in a marriage, even when it's over if such a thing is possible? And at the center of this story, the indomitable voice of Lucy Barton, her deep and perennial reflection on our very existence: «This is how life works. Everything we don't know until it's too late."
Olive Kitteridge
What is humanity? Perhaps this novel answers the question. Because literature and authors determined to narrate what we are from the inside out, address without artifice the fundamental, existential, philosophical, emotional question.
A magical realism revisited from the vision of Olive Kitteridge, a woman with enough vitality to live in that protective shell that builds a new world of conditions and prejudices, of that natural selfishness towards survival. But the best part of the story comes from the author's deconstruction of her own conception of Olive's environment. Because on many occasions we must resort to rethinking our existence and tear down the old walls of consciousness.
Routine is that strange protective blessing, especially as the years go by. The horizon of death seems to be able to recede if we, if Olive stays there, still, undaunted by the passage of time.
Action is necessary to reconnect with those with whom we share the inertias of this way of living in that kind of denial. And Olive's road to rebuilding is a blessed example when reality forces us to face fears in order to set ourselves completely free.
My name is Lucy Barton
Within that strange New York, profiled on so many occasions by authors such as Paul auster, we could discover characters like those that appear in this novel full of an open intimacy, exposed to the interpretations of the good reader who knows how to take advantage of the shameless existential interpellations that approach us.
Two women live in the same hospital room, Lucy and her mother. But from that place where we met the two women for 5 days, we visited those places of past memories through the sieve of both of their current circumstances.
The harshness of Lucy's life confronts us, however, with love, with her need, with her search under each of our steps. It is sad to think that the reunions after years between people as dear as a mother and a daughter have to happen due to sad circumstances.
But the magic of opportunity serves for this two-way testimony about a life shared in its hardest moments, then and also now. The rawness of the moment is lightened by those comings and goings to other moments, digging in search of those drops of happiness that can announce a minimum water table of optimistic survival.
The darkness of the past of these two women can be projected onto that idea of ​​life as a desperately brief breath, without the possibility of redemption for what was not faced well in light of the consequences. Lucy is sick, yes, but perhaps this stadium is a unique opportunity, if everything has to be closed before that supposed time that we are granted.
Other recommended books by Elizabeth Strout…
Lucy and the sea
Characters like Lucy Barton also deserve a saga. Because not everything is going to be deliveries of detectives or any other kind of current heroes. Surviving is already a heroic act. And Lucy is our survivor yearning to face the worst of anti-heroes or villains: oneself...
As fear grips her town, Lucy Barton leaves Manhattan and hunkers down in a Maine town with her ex-husband, William. During the following months, the two of them, companions after so many years, will be alone with their complex past in a small house next to an impetuous sea, an experience from which they will emerge transformed.
With a voice imbued with an "intimate, fragile and desperate humanity" (The Washington Post) Elizabeth Strout explores the ins and outs of the human heart in a revolutionary and luminous portrait of personal relationships during a period of isolation. At the center of this story are the deep ties that unite us even when we are apart: the pain of a daughter suffering, the emptiness after the death of a loved one, the promise of a budding friendship and the comfort of an old love that still lasts
The Burgess Brothers
We are warned that the past can never be covered, or covered, or of course forgotten ... The past is a dead person that cannot be buried, an old ghost that cannot be cremated.
If the past had those critical moments in which everything turned into what it shouldn't be; if childhood was broken into a thousand pieces by the strange shadows of the cruelest reality; don't worry, those memories will eventually dig themselves up and touch your back, knowing that you are going to turn, yes or yes.
A tiny town in Maine ... (what good memories Maine, the land of ghosts of Stephen King), children stamped against the harshness of a broken childhood. The passage of time and the flight forward, like the fugitives from Sodom, only wishing to become statues of salt before having to recover the flavors of the past.
Jim and Bob try to make their lives, far from what they were, confident that, although they can not bury the past, they can move away from it in physical distance. New York as the ideal city to forget about oneself. But Jim and Bob will have to go back. They are the traps of the past, which always know how to recover you for their cause...
Synopsis: Haunted by the strange accident in which their father died, Jim and Bob flee their hometown in Maine, leaving their sister Susan there, and settle in New York as soon as age allows.
But their fragile emotional balance is destabilized when Susan calls them desperate for help. Thus, the Burgess brothers return to the scenes of their childhood, and the tensions that shaped and overshadowed family relationships, silenced for years, surface in an unpredictable and painful way.
