Our Souls at Night: A novel, by Kent Haruf
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Our Souls at Night: A novel, by Kent Haruf
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A spare yet eloquent, bittersweet yet inspiring story of a man and a woman who, in advanced age, come together to wrestle with the events of their lives and their hopes for the imminent future. In the familiar setting of Holt, Colorado, home to all of Kent Haruf’s inimitable fiction, Addie Moore pays an unexpected visit to a neighbor, Louis Waters. Her husband died years ago, as did his wife, and in such a small town they naturally have known of each other for decades; in fact, Addie was quite fond of Louis’s wife. His daughter lives hours away in Colorado Springs, her son even farther away in Grand Junction, and Addie and Louis have long been living alone in houses now empty of family, the nights so terribly lonely, especially with no one to talk with. Their brave adventures—their pleasures and their difficulties—are hugely involving and truly resonant, making Our Souls at Night the perfect final installment to this beloved writer’s enduring contribution to American literature.
Our Souls at Night: A novel, by Kent Haruf - Amazon Sales Rank: #4191 in Books
- Brand: Haruf, Kent
- Published on: 2015-05-26
- Released on: 2015-05-26
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 7.80" h x .70" w x 5.30" l, .60 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 192 pages
Our Souls at Night: A novel, by Kent Haruf Amazon.com Review
An Amazon Best Book of June 2015: Elderly widow Addie Moore pays a visit to her aging widower neighbor, Louis Waters. They were never close, just knew each other peripherally, which makes the reason for this social call all the more intriguing. Addie would like to know if Louis is interested in sleeping with her. Now, now, this scenario was conceived by the late, great Kent Haruf—Our Souls at Night is no 50 Shades of Geriatric Grey. Set in the same fictional Colorado town as his National Book Award-nominated Plainsong, a town with its fair share of gossips, Addie and Louis embark on an unlikely friendship, an antidote to the loneliness they most exquisitely felt at night. As this friendship deepens, it is tested by said busybodies and meddling family members, plot points that almost distract from what makes this novel such a fitting and sweet swan song. Our Souls at Night was inspired, in part, by Haruf’s own marriage and the intimate, late-night conversations he and his wife relished, just like Addie and Louis. And just like Addie and Louis, Haruf proved that you’re never too old to reinvent yourself, take risks, find love, and write a great novel. --Erin Kodicek
Review “More Winesburg that Mayberry, Holt and its residents are shaped by physical solitude and emotional reticence. . . . Haruf's fiction ratifies ordinary, nonflashy decency, but he also knows that even the most placid lives are more complicated than they appear from the outside. . . . The novel is a plainspoken, vernacular farewell.” —Catherine Holmes, The Charleston Post and Courier“A marvelous addition to his oeuvre. . . . spare but eloquent, bittersweet yet hopeful.” —Kurt Rabin, The Fredericksburg Freelance-Star“Lateness—and second chances—have always been a theme for Haruf. But here, in a book about love and the aftermath of grief, in his final hours, he has produced his most intense expression of that yet. . . . Packed into less than 200 pages are all the issues late life provokes.” —John Freeman, The Boston Globe“A fitting close to a storied career, a beautiful rumination on aging, accommodation, and our need to connect. . . . As a meditation on life and forthcoming death, Haruf couldn’t have done any better. He has given us a powerful, pared-down story of two characters who refuse to go gentle into that good night.” —Lynn Rosen, The Philadelphia Enquirer“A delicate, sneakily devastating evocation of place and character. . . . Haruf’s story accumulates resonance through carefully chosen details; the novel is quiet but never complacent.” —The New Yorker“Elegiac, mournful and compassionate. . .a triumphant end to an inspiring literary career [and] a reminder of a loss on the American cultural landscape, as well as a parting gift from a master storyteller.” —William J. Cobb, The Dallas Morning News“A fine and poignant novel that demonstrates that our desire to love and to be loved does not dissolve with age. . . . The story speeds along, almost as if it's a page-turning mystery.” —Joseph Peschel, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch“By turns amusing and sad, skipping-down-the-sidewalk light and pensive. . . . I recommend reading it straight through, then sitting in quiet reflection of beautiful literary art.” —Fred Ohles, The Lincoln Journal Star“Haruf is never sentimental, and the ending—multiple twists packed into the last twenty pages—is gritty, painful and utterly human. . . . His novels are imbued with an affection and understanding that transform the most mundane details into poetry. Like the friendly light shining from Addie's window, Haruf’s final novel is a beacon of hope; he is sorely missed.” —Francesca Wade, Financial Times “Haruf was knows as a great writer and teacher whose work will endure. . . . The cadence of this book is soft and gentle, filled with shy emotion, as tentative as a young person's first kiss—timeless in its beauty. . . . Addie and Louis find a type of love that, as our society ages, ever more people in the baby boom generation may find is the only kind of love that matters.” —Jim Ewing, The Jackson Clarion-Ledger“There is so much wisdom in this beautifully pared-back and gentle book. . . a small, quiet gem, written in English so plain that it sparkles.” —Anne Susskind, The Sydney Morning Herald“His great subject was the struggle of decency against small-mindedness, and his rare gift was to make sheer decency a moving subject. . . . [This] novel runs on the dogged insistence that simple elements carry depths, and readers will find much to be grateful for.” —Joan Silber, The New York Times Book Review“In a fitting and gorgeous end to a body of work that prizes resilience above all else, Haruf has bequeathed readers a map charting a future that is neither easy nor painless, but it’s also not something we have to bear alone.” —Esquire“Utterly charming [and] distilled to elemental purity. . . . such a tender, carefully polished work that it seems like a blessing we had no right to expect.” —Ron Charles, The Washington Post“Haruf spent a life making art from our blind collisions, and Our Souls at Night is a fitting finish.” —John Reimringer, The Minneapolis Star Tribune“Haruf once again banishes doubts. Our souls can surprise us. Beneath the surface of reticent lives—and of Haruf’s calm prose—they prove unexpectedly brave.” —Ann Hulbert, The Atlantic“Blunt, textured, and dryly humorous. . . this quietly elegiac novel caps a fine, late-blooming and tenacious writing career. . . . Haruf’s gift is to make hay of the unexpected, and it feels like a mercy. . . . This is a novel for just after sunset on a summer’s eve, when the sky is still light and there is much to see, if you are looking.” —Wingate Packard, The Seattle Times“A parting gift [and] a reminder of how profoundly we will miss Holt and its people, and Kent Haruf's extraordinary writing.” —Sandra Dallas, The Denver Post“Short, spare and moving...Our Souls at Night is already creating a stir.” —Jennifer Maloney, The Wall Street Journal
About the Author
KENT HARUF is the author of five previous novels (and, with the photographer Peter Brown, West of Last Chance). His honors include a Whiting Foundation Writers’ Award, the Mountains & Plains Booksellers Award, the Wallace Stegner Award, and a special citation from the PEN/Hemingway Foundation; he was also a finalist for the National Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the New Yorker Book Award. He died in November 2014, at the age of seventy-one.
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Most helpful customer reviews
183 of 191 people found the following review helpful. Why can't adult children let their parents live their own lives? By R. M. Peterson About eight years ago I read "Plainsong" and I was thunderstruck. It was so good I immediately turned to "Eventide", which was almost as powerful and affecting. I eagerly went on to one of Haruf's earlier novels, "Where You Once Belonged", but it was merely average and I figured that I had reached the end of the road with Kent Haruf. But from beyond the grave (he died last November) Haruf reaches out with OUR SOULS AT NIGHT. This valedictory novel is on the same elevated plane as "Plainsong" and "Eventide". Three exceptional novels is quite a legacy.As with his earlier novels, OUR SOULS AT NIGHT is set on the plains of eastern Colorado, in the town of Holt. The model for Holt probably is Yuma, Colorado, but in truth it is a town like many others on the High Plains. Small and rather insular, rural, everyone knows everyone else's business, conservative in politics and religion, a populace that outsiders and especially liberal urbanites might dismiss as small-minded, but with many hard-working folk, a handful of misfits, and a surprising number of basically decent, wise, but unprepossessing souls.Addie Moore and Louis Waters fall into that last category. Addie is seventy and has lived in Holt for forty-four years; she has been a widow for some time. Louis, about the same age and a widower, grew up in Holt, went away to college and to start a career, and then came back forty-six years ago. Their houses are only a block apart, but they had not known each other well. One evening Addie shows up at Louis's door and asks to talk to him. I wonder if you would consider coming to my house sometimes to sleep with me. What? How do you mean? I mean we're both alone. We've been by ourselves for too long. For years. I'm lonely. I think you might be too. I wonder if you would come and sleep in the night with me. And talk. He stared at her, watching her, curious now, cautious. You don't say anything. Have I taken your breath away? she said. I guess you have. I'm not talking about sex. I wondered. No, not sex. I'm not looking at it that way. I think I've lost any sexual impulse a long time ago. I'm talking about getting through the night. And lying warm in bed, companionably.So begins a late-in-life love affair between two souls who had resigned themselves to living out the remainder of their days rather lonely. Louis maintains his house but in the evenings he walks down the street to Addie's and the next morning he walks home again. The relationship expands, even -- after a few months -- to sex. The arrangement scandalizes some, but Louis and Addie don't care. Their children do, however, especially Addie's son Gene. And there's the rub.As trite as it might sound, OUR SOULS AT NIGHT is a beautiful story. It is not sensational, it is not edgy, it is not cynical, nor is it freighted with irony like so much modern literature. What it is, is honest. Haruf's prose is pared-down and limpid, maybe even more so than in his earlier novels. OUR SOULS AT NIGHT can be read in a single evening. It you are anything like me, it will be one of your better evenings of reading.
191 of 202 people found the following review helpful. 'NOW TALK TO ME. TELL ME SOMETHING I HAVEN'T HEARD YET.' By David Keymer Addie Moore’s husband died years ago. So did Louis Waters’s wife. They live in the same town, not far from each other, in the houses they shared with their spouses for decades. They know of each other but were never friends, just neighbors who acted friendly toward each other in passing. Then one evening, just before dark, Addie shows up on Louis’s porch. He invites her in and she makes a proposal to him: it’s one of the oddest he’s ever heard but he understands it. She wants him to come over to her house some night and sleep with her. Not for sex. For talk. Comfort. To sleep with someone else for a night, maybe more nights, but not to live with him. He’s lonely too, though he’s never admitted it to himself. He does it. Their relationship blossoms. They find they have a lot to talk about: their dead mates, their children, how their marriages worked out (mixed good and not as good), how neither of them wound up making of their lives what they wanted from them. Addie’s son drops his son Jamie off with grandma while he goes through a rough patch: his wife has left him, his business is folding, and he may go bankrupt. Louis and Addie adjust to Jamie, help him grow. By then the neighborhood knows of their relationship: some approve, some don’t. Addie and Louis have learned one of the advantages of growing old. They don’t have to care any more what other people think of their behavior. The only opinions that count are their own. That’s liberating after a life of living so other people don’t condemn you.Late in the book, Addie asks Louis what he thinks of their arrangement.I’ve gotten so I can stand it, he said. It feels normal now.Just normal?I’m trying to have some fun with you.I know you are. Tell me the truth.The truth is I like it. I like it a lot. I’d miss it if I didn’t have it. What about you?I love it, she said. It’s better than I had hoped for. It’s a kind of mystery. I like the friendship of it. I like the time together. Being here in the dark of the night. The talking. Hearing you breathe next to me if I wake up.I like all that too.Now talk to me. Tell me something I haven’t heard yet.I don’t want to spoil the ending of this book. It takes an unexpected twist and isn’t all happiness. But the overwhelming impression this book leaves in your mind is of simple friendship that moves into love, and of two old people who discover they’re still able to learn and grow.It’s beautiful. There are no verbal fireworks, no peeking inside characters’ heads. Everything is observed from the outside. It’s simple. Clean. Human. Haruf is like a benevolent grandfather who looks down on his creatures’ antics without judging them, never condemning.(Note: Haruf was dying when he wrote this. His widow finished the editing.)
99 of 102 people found the following review helpful. Moving By FatOrangeTabby I love Kent Haruf. It makes me very sad that this is the last book I will ever read of his, because he is gone. All of his books are so simply written, yet so complex. They aren't difficult to read, but yet they can stir up emotions you didn't know existed.Our Souls at Night, like his other works, takes place in a small town. When Addie Moore makes an unusual proposition to Louis Waters that he start to sleep at her house, in her bed, and just talk, I started to think that I wouldn't care for this novel. But as I read on (and it is a quick read, unfortunately) I started to become engrossed in their past. Both of them alone and heading into old age, Addie and Louis are lonely and when they begin to talk about the things that happened so many years ago, it makes me stop and wonder what I will have to say about my own life when I reach that point. After awhile Addie's grandson Jamie comes to stay with her, and things get complicated. I don't want to say too much because I want you to experience it for yourself, but it was not at all what I expected.It's a beautiful novel. If you enjoy his other work, there is no doubt you will love this one. If you have never read any of his work, read them. I think you will love them all.
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