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 consciousness in the face of pain, be it a pain past or present and their own or someone else's, manifests itself in the lives of some protagonists who offer a heartfelt presentation of the circumstances in which they have lived. It is a question of knowing if there can be some compensation against bad luck, against so many and many evils that threaten the individual once they are unprotected and peered into the abyss of their 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 the mental incapacity to participate in the burden of the weight of the world.
A very different case is that of the pregnant girl, with an impossible fit in what was always her home. The morals 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 say 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 almost not had.
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.
You can buy the book The song of the plain, Kent Haruf's new novel, here: