He wants to tell us what matters here

Posted on by Live & Learn

cover-kent-haruf-souls

Kent Haruf died on November 30, 2014 at the age of 71.  He finished this novel shortly before he died and it was published posthumously.  The story is based in a fictional small town of Holt, Colorado, the home of his award winning Trilogy: Plainsong (1999), Eventide (2004) and Benediction (2013). Ursula Le Guin’s book review beautifully captures the feeling of this novel:

Ursula K Le Guin:  “I don’t think there’s a false word in Kent Haruf’s final novel, Our Souls in the Night. Nor, for all the colloquial ease and transparency of the prose and the apparent simplicity of the story, is there a glib word, or a predictable one. Ordinarily the circumstances of the writing of a novel aren’t of much interest to me as a reader, but in this case, I am moved, even awed, to consider that the book was written while the author was dying. It is a report from the edge of darkness, made in the consciousness of responsibility. Haruf is bearing witness. Having gone farther than we have, he wants to tell us what matters there. His knowledge of his situation, and my knowledge of it as I read the book, made me appreciate the rare privilege of being with a person who is past the need to say anything but what needs to be said.  The voice is quiet. All the darkness is there, but we’re looking at the light. A lamp in a bedroom in a small town in Colorado.

: A remarkably simple invitation sets things in motion. Addie Moore, a widow, asks Louis Waters, a widower and neighbor, to sleep with her. “Sleep” means both more and less than you might first think for these septuagenarians (in their 70’s).

After dark one night they walked over to the grade school playground and Louis pushed Addie on the big chain swing and she rode up and back in the cool fresh night air of late summer with the hem of her skirt fluttering over her knees. Afterward they went back to bed in her upstairs front room and lay beside each other naked in the summer air coming in from the open windows.

~ Kent Haruf, Our Souls at Night: A novel

Kent Haruf’s Our Souls in the Night: Highly recommended.

20 thoughts on “He wants to tell us what matters here”

Leave a Reply