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![Olive Kitteridge: Fiction by [Elizabeth Strout]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41EEvy6tUGS._SY346_.jpg)
Olive Kitteridge: Fiction Kindle Edition
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In a voice more powerful and compassionate than ever before, New York Times bestselling author Elizabeth Strout binds together thirteen rich, luminous narratives into a book with the heft of a novel, through the presence of one larger-than-life, unforgettable character: Olive Kitteridge.
At the edge of the continent, Crosby, Maine, may seem like nowhere, but seen through this brilliant writer’s eyes, it’s in essence the whole world, and the lives that are lived there are filled with all of the grand human drama–desire, despair, jealousy, hope, and love.
At times stern, at other times patient, at times perceptive, at other times in sad denial, Olive Kitteridge, a retired schoolteacher, deplores the changes in her little town and in the world at large, but she doesn’t always recognize the changes in those around her: a lounge musician haunted by a past romance: a former student who has lost the will to live: Olive’s own adult child, who feels tyrannized by her irrational sensitivities; and Henry, who finds his loyalty to his marriage both a blessing and a curse.
As the townspeople grapple with their problems, mild and dire, Olive is brought to a deeper understanding of herself and her life–sometimes painfully, but always with ruthless honesty. Olive Kitteridge offers profound insights into the human condition–its conflicts, its tragedies and joys, and the endurance it requires.
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKOF THE YEAR BY
People • USA Today • The Atlantic • The Washington Post Book World • Seattle Post-Intelligencer • Entertainment Weekly • The Christian Science Monitor • San Francisco Chronicle • Salon • San Antonio Express-News • Chicago Tribune • The Wall Street Journal
“Perceptive, deeply empathetic . . . Olive is the axis around which these thirteen complex, relentlessly human narratives spin themselves into Elizabeth Strout’s unforgettable novel in stories.”—O: The Oprah Magazine
“Fiction lovers, remember this name: Olive Kitteridge. . . . You’ll never forget her. . . . [Elizabeth Strout] constructs her stories with rich irony and moments of genuine surprise and intense emotion. . . . Glorious, powerful stuff.”—USA Today
BONUS: This edition includes an excerpt from Elizabeth Strout’s The Burgess Boys.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherRandom House
- Publication dateMarch 25, 2008
- File size5571 KB
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the hardcover edition.
From Booklist
Review
“Fiction lovers, remember this name: Olive Kitteridge. . . . You’ll never forget her. . . . [Elizabeth Strout] constructs her stories with rich irony and moments of genuine surprise and intense emotion. . . . Glorious, powerful stuff.”—USA Today
“Funny, wicked and remorseful, Mrs. Kitteridge is a compelling life force, a red-blooded original. When she’s not onstage, we look forward to her return. The book is a page-turner because of her.”—San Francisco Chronicle
“Olive Kitteridge still lingers in memory like a treasured photograph.”—Seattle Post-Intelligencer
“Rarely does a story collection pack such a gutsy emotional punch.”—Entertainment Weekly
“Strout animates the ordinary with astonishing force. . . . [She] makes us experience not only the terrors of change but also the terrifying hope that change can bring: she plunges us into these churning waters and we come up gasping for air.”—The New Yorker
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
For many years Henry Kitteridge was a pharmacist in the next town over, driving every morning on snowy roads, or rainy roads, or summertime roads, when the wild raspberries shot their new growth in brambles along the last section of town before he turned off to where the wider road led to the pharmacy. Retired now, he still wakes early and remembers how mornings used to be his favorite, as though the world were his secret, tires rumbling softly beneath him and the light emerging through the early fog, the brief sight of the bay off to his right, then the pines, tall and slender, and almost always he rode with the window partly open because he loved the smell of the pines and the heavy salt air, and in the winter he loved the smell of the cold.
The pharmacy was a small two-story building attached to another building that housed separately a hardware store and a small grocery. Each morning Henry parked in the back by the large metal bins, and then entered the pharmacy’s back door, and went about switching on the lights, turning up the thermostat, or, if it was summer, getting the fans going. He would open the safe, put money in the register, unlock the front door, wash his hands, put on his white lab coat. The ritual was pleasing, as though the old store—with its shelves of toothpaste, vitamins, cosmetics, hair adornments, even sewing needles and greeting cards, as well as red rubber hot water bottles, enema pumps—was a person altogether steady and steadfast. And any unpleasantness that may have occurred back in his home, any uneasiness at the way his wife often left their bed to wander through their home in the night’s dark hours—all this receded like a shoreline as he walked through the safety of his pharmacy. Standing in the back, with the drawers and rows of pills, Henry was cheerful when the phone began to ring, cheerful when Mrs. Merriman came for her blood pressure medicine, or old Cliff Mott arrived for his digitalis, cheerful when he prepared the Valium for Rachel Jones, whose husband ran off the night their baby was born. It was Henry’s nature to listen, and many times during the week he would say, “Gosh, I’m awful sorry to hear that,” or “Say, isn’t that something?”
Inwardly, he suffered the quiet trepidations of a man who had witnessed twice in childhood the nervous breakdowns of a mother who had otherwise cared for him with stridency. And so if, as rarely happened, a customer was distressed over a price, or irritated by the quality of an Ace bandage or ice pack, Henry did what he could to rectify things quickly. For many years Mrs. Granger worked for him; her husband was a lobster fisherman, and she seemed to carry with her the cold breeze of the open water, not so eager to please a wary customer. He had to listen with half an ear as he filled prescriptions, to make sure she was not at the cash register dismissing a complaint. More than once he was reminded of that same sensation in watching to see that his wife, Olive, did not bear down too hard on Christopher over a homework assignment or a chore left undone; that sense of his attention hovering—the need to keep everyone content. When he heard a briskness in Mrs. Granger’s voice, he would step down from his back post, moving toward the center of the store to talk with the customer himself. Otherwise, Mrs. Granger did her job well. He appreciated that she was not chatty, kept perfect inventory, and almost never called in sick. That she died in her sleep one night astonished him, and left him with some feeling of responsibility, as though he had missed, working alongside her for years, whatever symptom might have shown itself that he, handling his pills and syrups and syringes, could have fixed.
“Mousy,” his wife said, when he hired the new girl. “Looks just like a mouse.”
Denise Thibodeau had round cheeks, and small eyes that peeped through her brown-framed glasses. “But a nice mouse,” Henry said. “A cute one.”
“No one’s cute who can’t stand up straight,” Olive said. It was true that Denise’s narrow shoulders sloped forward, as though apologizing for something. She was twenty-two, just out of the state university of Vermont. Her husband was also named Henry, and Henry Kitteridge, meeting Henry Thibodeau for the first time, was taken with what he saw as an unself-conscious excellence. The young man was vigorous and sturdy-featured with a light in his eye that seemed to lend a flickering resplendence to his decent, ordinary face. He was a plumber, working in a business owned by his uncle. He and Denise had been married one year.
“Not keen on it,” Olive said, when he suggested they have the young couple to dinner. Henry let it drop. This was a time when his son—not yet showing the physical signs of adolescence—had become suddenly and strenuously sullen, his mood like a poison shot through the air, and Olive seemed as changed and changeable as Christopher, the two having fast and furious fights that became just as suddenly some blanket of silent intimacy where Henry, clueless, stupefied, would find himself to be the odd man out.
But standing in the back parking lot at the end of a late summer day, while he spoke with Denise and Henry Thibodeau, and the sun tucked itself behind the spruce trees, Henry Kitteridge felt such a longing to be in the presence of this young couple, their faces turned to him with a diffident but eager interest as he recalled his own days at the university many years ago, that he said, “Now, say. Olive and I would like you to come for supper soon.”
He drove home, past the tall pines, past the glimpse of the bay, and thought of the Thibodeaus driving the other way, to their trailer on the outskirts of town. He pictured the trailer, cozy and picked up—for Denise was neat in her habits—and imagined them sharing the news of their day. Denise might say, “He’s an easy boss.” And Henry might say, “Oh, I like the guy a lot.”
He pulled into his driveway, which was not a driveway so much as a patch of lawn on top of the hill, and saw Olive in the garden. “Hello, Olive,” he said, walking to her. He wanted to put his arms around her, but she had a darkness that seemed to stand beside her like an acquaintance that would not go away. He told her the Thibodeaus were coming for supper. “It’s only right,” he said.
Olive wiped sweat from her upper lip, turned to rip up a clump of onion grass. “Then that’s that, Mr. President,” she said. “Give your order to the cook.”
On Friday night the couple followed him home, and the young Henry shook Olive’s hand. “Nice place here,” he said. “With that view of the water. Mr. Kitteridge says you two built this yourselves.”
“Indeed, we did.”
Christopher sat sideways at the table, slumped in adolescent gracelessness, and did not respond when Henry Thibodeau asked him if he played any sports at school. Henry Kitteridge felt an unexpected fury sprout inside him; he wanted to shout at the boy, whose poor manners, he felt, revealed something unpleasant not expected to be found in the Kitteridge home.
“When you work in a pharmacy,” Olive told Denise, setting before her a plate of baked beans, “you learn the secrets of everyone in town.” Olive sat down across from her, pushed forward a bottle of ketchup.
“Have to know to keep your mouth shut. But seems like you know how to do that.”
“Denise understands,” Henry Kitteridge said.
Denise’s husband said, “Oh, sure. You couldn’t find someone more trustworthy than Denise.”
“I believe you,” Henry said, passing the man a basket of rolls. “And please. Call me Henry. One of my favorite names,” he added. Denise laughed quietly; she liked him, he could see this.
Christopher slumped farther into his seat.
Henry Thibodeau’s parents lived on a farm inland, and so the two Henrys discussed crops, and pole beans, and the corn not being as sweet this summer from the lack of rain, and how to get a good asparagus bed.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” said Olive, when, in passing the ketchup to the young man, Henry Kitteridge knocked it over, and ketchup lurched out like thickened blood across the oak table. Trying to pick up the bottle, he caused it to roll unsteadily, and ketchup ended up on his fingertips, then on his white shirt.
“Leave it,” Olive commanded, standing up. “Just leave it alone, Henry. For God’s sake.” And Henry Thibodeau, perhaps at the sound of his own name being spoken sharply, sat back, looking stricken.
“Gosh, what a mess I’ve made,” Henry Kitteridge said.
For dessert they were each handed a blue bowl with a scoop of vanilla ice cream sliding in its center. “Vanilla’s my favorite,” Denise said.
“Is it,” said Olive.
“Mine, too,” Henry Kitteridge said.
About the Author
From AudioFile
Product details
- ASIN : B0013TRR80
- Publisher : Random House; 1st edition (March 25, 2008)
- Publication date : March 25, 2008
- Language : English
- File size : 5571 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 280 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #11,041 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #24 in Literary Sagas
- #96 in Contemporary Literary Fiction
- #189 in Saga Fiction
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Elizabeth Strout is the author of the New York Times bestseller Olive Kitteridge, for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize; the national bestseller Abide with Me; and Amy and Isabelle, winner of the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award and the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize. She has also been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize in London. She lives in Maine and New York City.
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Reviewed in the United States on January 20, 2021
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Bride/Groom: I do
Me (to myself): You have no idea
My wife and I are in that time of our lives where we go to weddings of the kids our kids grew up with. During the last two weddings particularly I've been taken by the innocence, trust and hope the bride and groom have for their future lives. They say "I do" and they mean "I do" but they really have no idea (none of us have) of who their companion is and what the future holds in store for them.
Olive Kitteridge considers this fact when her son is marrying a woman she does not approve of:
"Weeping would not have come close to what she felt. She felt fear, sitting out there on her folding chair. Fear that her heart would squeeze shut again, would stop, the way it did once before, a fist punched through her back. And she felt it, too, at the way the bride was smiling up at Christopher, as though she actually knew him. Because did she know what he looked like in first grade when he had a nosebleed in Miss Lampley's class? Did she see him when he was a pale, slightly pudge child, his skin broken out in hives because he was afraid to take a spelling test? No, what Suzanne was mistaking for knowing someone was knowing sex with that person for a couple of weeks." (p67)
My wife and I have had our share of that future: we are both cancer survivors and have suffered through other maladies, surgeries, and other tests. Our share has been light compared to most; we have four friend couples whose children have been killed. I have no idea what that is like; but looking over the edge of that big black hole I know I'm supremely thankful that our challenges have not included that and hope that we will not.
Married life and the couples in the marriage change over time and the best we can hope is that we come through it together. When we are lucky, as my wife and I are, we come through the years closer and with more compassion and love than when we first met. We have been given the gift of love like Harmon had: "he felt something had been returned to him, as though the inestimable losses of life had been lifted like a boulder, and beneath he saw - under the attentive gaze of Daisy's blue eyes - the comforts and sweetness of what had once been." (p90)
Olive Kitteridge is the title character of a series of vignettes in which she is sometimes the main player, sometimes a side player and sometimes just barely mentioned in passing. Olive is a mean, cantankerous, scary, abusive person moving through life spreading pain along the way. She hurts inside: "She didn't like to be alone. Even more, she didn't like being with people." (p148)
In the worst of times we are incapable of expressing or feeling a lifting love: "She would like to say, Listen, Dr. Sue, deep down there is a thing inside me, and sometimes it swells up like the head of a squid and shoots blackness through me. I haven't wanted to be this way, but so help me, I have loved my son." (p71)
In some stories, as in life, the epiphany comes too late: "Angie,...fingering her black skirt, felt she had figured something out too late, an that must be the way of life, to get something figured out when it was too late." (p60)
Through it all, Olive can't relate to any of it. She attends a funeral "hoping that in the presence of someone else's sorrow, a tiny crack of light would somehow come through her own dark encasement. But it remains separate from her,..." (p 171) By the end of the novel we have a clearer picture of Olive; we understand the toll her miserable loneliness and the toll exacts. Would she be able, finally, to "close her eyes to the gaping loneliness of this sunlit world." ?
These are exquisite stories of relationship hits and misses. In addition to compelling dramatic narrative we get Elizabeth Strout's impeccable description of light, clouds, and the bays of Maine. I challenge you to go to a bookstore and read chapter two: Incoming Tide and be able to put the novel down without buying it.
If the brides and grooms are lucky they'll eventually discover "what young people did not know. They did not know that lumpy, aged, and wrinkled bodies were as needy as their own young, firm ones, that love was not to be tossed away carelessly, as if it were a tart on a platter with others that got passed around again. No, if love was available, one chose it, or didn't choose it. And if her platter had been full with the goodness of Henry and she had found it burdensome, had flicked it off crumbs at a time, it was because she had not known what one should know: that day after day was unconsciously squandered." (p 270)
Each story is as unique as it is layered. I have already read a few of the stories more than once.
Now in her early seventies, the lonely wife and mother finds the experience wondrous and amazing, a surprise.
"She remembered what hope was and this was it. That inner churning that moves you forward, plows you through life the way the boats below plowed the shiny water, the way the plane was plowing forward to a place new, and where she was needed."
Her exhilaration, unfortunately, doesn't last. Greeting her at the airport, her son Christopher seems for some reason to be furious. The visit ends early after three days, the relationship between son and daughter as frayed as her last pair of pantyhose, which she's worn to shreds.
Hope turns out to be a tenuous belief for nearly all the characters inhabiting rural coastal Maine where these 13 connecting stories take place over a span of three decades. Almost all the title characters are women and most feel dislocated, much like Rebecca Brown in "Criminal:" "I'm the kind of person that thinks if you took a map of the whole world and put a pin in it for every person, there wouldn't be a pin for me."
Olive Kitteridge, a former seventh grade math teacher, analytical, opinionated, overbearing and late in life grown bulky, figures large in people's lives and has a role to play in each of their stories.
Many stories are heartbreaking but often with a sharp zing of humor as in "A Little Burst" when Olive demonstrates her disapproval for her son's bride Suzanne on their wedding day by sneaking into their bedroom and rummaging through her new daughter-in-law's underwear drawer. She steals a bra. She uses a black Magic Marker to smear a wide line down the arm of an expensive beige sweater she's found in a bureau. Finally, from the closet, Olive takes one shoe of the bride's favorite pair of loafers and slips it into her purse.
Olive does all this just for the satisfaction of knowing that "at least there will be moments now when Suzanne will doubt herself. Looking through the laundry, her underwear drawer, some anxiety will flutter through her." And Suzanne would never know, would she, Olive muses.
Olive is so satisfied with herself and what she's done that she contemplates continuing to take a little something from Suzanne from time to time "just to keep the self-doubt alive. And to give herself a little burst."
The fear of being alone, of aging, of being unloved is a thread through the book. But somehow disappointment and disillusionment don't overpower the stories.
They never become mawkish. Instead, they seem to come alive and in a way become uplifting by being about real people struggling to find the means to sustain themselves and even bring a little bit of enjoyment into their lives.
Collectively, the Olive Kitteridge stories end up being - if not exactly enjoyable - certainly heartfelt and satisfying, always entertaining. The book ends in a strong affirmation that despite it all, there's always hope.
Top reviews from other countries

Olive Kitteridge is the indomitable presence throughout the book. Some stories have the faintest mention of Olive while in others she impacts with the overbearing resolve of a woman that is determined to get what she wants. Olive is rarely the focal point, but she acts as a magnet drawing each story to exist in her presence.
Olive is an ex-school teacher, a tall and often clumsy woman, but as the years progress she becomes big,
“… her ankles puffed out, her shoulders rolled up behind her neck, and her wrists and hands seemed to become the size of a man’s. Olive minds – of course she does; sometimes, privately, she minds very much. But at this stage of the game, she is not about to abandon the comfort of food, and that means right now she probably looks like a fat dozing seal wrapped in some kind of gauze bandage.”
Olive has a formidable presence and a complexity that is intriguing and undefinable. While she offers very little filter in her comments and consideration of others and thinks it ludicrous to cry at weddings, she cries when she sees a young anorexic girl, Nina.
“Olive shook her head again, blew her nose. She looked at Nina and said quietly, ‘I don’t know who you are, but young lady, you’re breaking my heart.’
‘I’m not trying to,’ said Nina, defensively. ‘It’s not like I can help it.’
‘Oh, I know that. I know.’ Olive nodded.”
The first story is a touching story of her husband, Harry, who is a pharmacist, and his relationship with a young married assistant who tragically loses her husband. The relationship is subtly transformed from a platonic friendship to the delicate suggestion of deeper feelings as he allows himself to imagine what life would be like with this young woman. The emotional conflict burdens him until he finally asks Olive if she would ever leave him. “Oh, for God’s sake Henry. You could make a woman sick.” she responds.
Most of the following stories reverberate with a sense of betrayal. You can feel the connection with the characters, laugh through incidents, be astounded by some events, nod in recognition with many, and shed a tear or two at others. The writing is emotionally stimulating and reveals such vivid moments that give breath to sentiments you may not have been expecting.
This is a wonderful reading experience, infused with beautiful prose, images and feelings that we all encounter or witness throughout our lives. I would highly recommend this book. The reason why I jumped to read this book after it sitting on my bookshelf for so long, was that the sequel, Olive, Again, is due for release on 31st October this year.

Thought it a thoroughly miserable read. Olive is not a pleasant woman who values no one but herself. Very disjointed book Few connections between one chapter and the next. The most positive thing I can say is that the characters in some chapters were interesting.
My advice is don't bother with this book.

Some did not like the format of 13 short stories about people in the community - 2 of which Olive was not even apparently relevant to.
Not a cheerful book - OK it is showing a community and how people's lives intertwine but surely some people could be happy too...

