Olive Kitteridge

Summary: A collection of short stories set in a small coastal village in Maine, centering around an aging and abrasive middle school teacher, Olive Kitteridge.

Olive Kitteridge is characterized at one point in this book as having “a way about her that was absolutely without apology.” Her son at one point described her moods as capricious and that she never accepted responsibility for the ways she affected others. She was tall and imposing, irascible and difficult. And yet. She could cut through niceties to help a young man ready to take his life, or truly sympathize with a widow while her own husband was a vegetable. What you saw was what you got, and yet there were hidden depths to her that could catch you by surprise.

Olive show more Kitteridge and her husband Henry live in the small coastal town of Crosby, Maine. Olive is a middle school math teacher and Henry a pharmacist. Elizabeth Strout develops Olive’s character through a series of chronologically arranged short stories featuring different people in the town. Olive is not in every one of them but recurs throughout the book, intersecting with a number of the characters as she retires from teaching, sharing life with Henry, a most accommodating husband, as they go through life’s changes and grief’s, including a son for whom they built a house, only for him to move across country at his wife’s behest, only for her to divorce him, and then for him to return to New York and a new marriage. Olive grieves so much she won’t drive past the house, leading to an improbable adventure at the local ER.

The stories explore the challenges and comforts of marital love, the infidelities of mind and body of different villagers, including Henry at one point for his pharmacist assistant Denise. There are heartbreaks and verbal wounds that are not easily healed. But one thing you will never find is hypocrisy from Olive. One of the highlights was when Olive overhears her new daughter-in-law making fun of her clothes. Most of us would fume and pretend we had not heard. Olive goes into the daughter-in-law’s closet and deviously ruins several articles of clothing. She can be maddeningly matter-of-fact in her acceptance of life’s hardships. What else ought one expect of life?

Despite all the flaws and foibles and failures of individuals, Strout portrays a community that somehow coheres, that is there for each other in the hardest moments. She creates a place and a character rooted in that place in Olive–the houses she builds, the tulips she plants, the donut shop she and Henry loved to get donuts from. Olive and the others endure loss and glimpse their mortality, making there way through life and finding what comfort they can in each other.

In the end, we see a character who seemed utterly certain of herself, who does not change, but turns her honesty upon herself and comes to more settled terms with the person she is, and the possibilities of her remaining life. There is both fine writing and fine insight into the human condition here. show less

Exquisite writing. Yes, sad--poignant really, more than sad--, but marvelously real. I love these characters in their honesty, and their honest dishonesty. In this string of related stories, Strout has created a world filled with agonizing truths. She cuts to these truths with a facility for language, tone, and everyday drama so fluid and engaging that even when a story ended leaving me a bit breathless or raw (as happened several times), after 24 hours I found myself missing the characters and their world and eager to open the book again. Even the format of the book, peripheral and overlapping stories, appears to be the perfect way to portray life honestly. In sum, a touching book I know I'll read and recommend again and again.

This title has been on and off my TBR list ever since it was published. I finally took a leap of faith and decided to tackle it as an audiobook for my morning runs.

I loved it. If you are interested in plot-driven novels, then this one is not for you. However, characters in a novel are what you want to read about, you will like this story. We as readers are looking at Olive Kitteridge from different angels . We are following her over many years and get to see her through the eyes of other people living in this small community in Maine.

Although Olive grew on me, it would be an overstatement to say that I loved her. I developed an understanding for her, and I felt sorry for her. She is loud, obnoxious, abrasive - in short, not the kind show more of person, I want to befriend. It is her inability to express feelings and compassion that leaves many people bewildered why Olive Kitteridge is in their lives and how to deal with her. To the very end, I hoped that she would change somehow, but it did not really happen. However, no matter I might be about her coldness, I have decided that there is a soft heart hidden underneath a very hard shell which made spending time with Olive worthwhile. show less

I loved this book because it's so refreshing to meet a real character with so many flaws and who is such a bitch. She is one of the most interesting, well described people I've met in a story in a long time. Although she is the central character, this is a collection of short stories about the people who live in a small town in Maine, near the coast. We meet Olive and her husband Henry in the first chapter. Henry is a local pharmacist and Olive teaches math at the high school. Her students are terrified of her and Henry absolutely adores her. He is a kind, generous, neighbourly person while she is opinionated, vicious and mean to her family and few friends. They have a son Christopher, who leaves home as soon as he can.
These stories show more are about ordinary people with their own mental health issues, loneliness and heartache and yet there are several where the characters find joy in everyday living. Each is such a well drawn character with a mundane or interesting life that their life experiences are fascinating.
We witness Christopher marry twice, Olive retire, Henry have a stroke and Olive mellow a little over time. What is particularly enjoyable is to watch Christopher stand up to his mother after years of therapy and anger management. Olive does settle a little into her life as an old lady and she seems to appreciate her own loneliness and that of others. The last chapter where she befriends Jack Kennison, a rich Republican, is told very tenderly. show less

Olive Kitteridge is a woman who can't get out of her own way. The former teacher not only has trouble understanding the motivations and feelings of others, she often has no insight into her own. Her rigidity in dealing with strangers, friends and family very often undermines any attempt she makes at negotiating a pleasant detente with society. Told through a series of mostly connected stories, most featuring Olive, but some only including her tangentially, we watch Olive's struggles with the world at large.
Strout's stories are insightful, rich in feeling and full of wonderful characters who will leave you hoping for more. I anticipate Strout's "Olive, Again" will be a current read of mine very soon.
I enjoyed Kimberly Farr's narration. show more She captured Olive in all of her emotional struggles and provided a nice balance with the other characters as they sometimes saw in Olive aspects of herself that she missed. show less

I finished this book in about a week, and it may have been the best book I read all year. Strout evokes New England in a way that makes it seem both insane and full of aching nostalgia and clean simplicity. All of the bruised people, wary and gossiping but somehow also keeping to themselves, go about their lives with a kind of quiet pain. And yet the novel isn't ultimately sad. Olive Kitteridge, bristling, tough and emotional, is an incredibly complex and memorable character. The way Strout writes the novel, in stories sometimes about Olive, sometimes about others in the town, works with a kind of subtle magic. Some of the stories are better than others - the first one is brilliant and gives Henry (Olive's husband) to the reader in such show more a full and intriguing way that he stays lodged in your heart even though he's only seen in the rest of the stories briefly and through someone else's eyes.

The prose itself is quite simple, but all the more powerful and human for it. "She'd been through some things, but never mind. She straightened her back. Other people had been through things, too."

I adored this book and wish it had been twice as long. The Pulitzer was more than deserved. show less

Each selection in this "novel in short stories" is wonderfully written and sharply observed, but to me, they didn't add up to a compelling whole. Each story introduced new plots, thematic concerns and characters, and, by the time I got to the later stories I had already forgotten the details of the earlier ones. So, while I liked the core story of prickly Olive, her gentle husband Henry, and her not-so-lovable son Christopher, the rest of the denizens of Crosby, Maine struck me as superfluous. I would have preferred a novel about the Kitteridge family instead.