I just finished my second Laurie Colwin book: The Lone Pilgrim, a collection of short stories. What I love about short stories in general, and Ms. Colwin's stories in particular, is the way the main characters are in sharp focus and the secondary characters are in soft focus-- kind of like a close up of a flower, where you can see fuzzy green and other colors and shapes around it, framing it, but it's the flower you really notice.
In "The Lone Pilgrim", the narrator comments, "But steady as I am, why am I so solitary? No matter how orderly, measured, and careful my arrangements are, they are only a distillation of me, not a fusion of myself and someone else. I have my domestic comforts, except that mine are only mine." In "Travel", our heroine notes her independence. "The food I lived on was eccentric. I strained yogurt through cheesecloth to concentrate it, and I ate it with pickled cabbage and salted Japanese plums...the odd tastes of a solitary person." When she gives this meal to her future husband, it never occurs to her "that he might have the same odd taste, or his own odd taste."
But as lone and solitary as Ms. Colwin's characters are, they aren't immune to heartache. Miss Greenway, in "Saint Anthony of the Desert", laments a lost love who has returned for a final farewell. "His ease in my apartment broke my heart. I wanted to say, like Saint Anthony of the Desert, 'Why do you do harm to me when I harm none of you? Go away, and in the Lord's name, do not come near these things again.' He did go away, and that was the last I even saw of him."
Ms. Corwin writes with the honesty of Andrea Lee and Nell Freudenberger and her books will surely hold a point of reference for me for years to come.
netflix stars 5/5.
In "The Lone Pilgrim", the narrator comments, "But steady as I am, why am I so solitary? No matter how orderly, measured, and careful my arrangements are, they are only a distillation of me, not a fusion of myself and someone else. I have my domestic comforts, except that mine are only mine." In "Travel", our heroine notes her independence. "The food I lived on was eccentric. I strained yogurt through cheesecloth to concentrate it, and I ate it with pickled cabbage and salted Japanese plums...the odd tastes of a solitary person." When she gives this meal to her future husband, it never occurs to her "that he might have the same odd taste, or his own odd taste."
But as lone and solitary as Ms. Colwin's characters are, they aren't immune to heartache. Miss Greenway, in "Saint Anthony of the Desert", laments a lost love who has returned for a final farewell. "His ease in my apartment broke my heart. I wanted to say, like Saint Anthony of the Desert, 'Why do you do harm to me when I harm none of you? Go away, and in the Lord's name, do not come near these things again.' He did go away, and that was the last I even saw of him."
Ms. Corwin writes with the honesty of Andrea Lee and Nell Freudenberger and her books will surely hold a point of reference for me for years to come.
netflix stars 5/5.
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