Olive Kitteridge

Most people know I grew up in Kansas, and although Wichita is not a particularly small town, it sometimes felt that way. Family trips up to Ipswich, MA to see my cousins, or summer vacations to Santa Fe, Colorado or Italy confirmed to me that the world was bigger and I needed to see it.  I couldn't imagine why everyone didn't want to leave.  I moved to Boston after graduation and hardly looked back.   I thought reading Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout reminded me of the insularity I sometimes felt growing up.

Olive is the main character connecting a dozen or so stories set in small town Maine.  She's a curmudgeon, large and unattractive, overbearing and overall mean.  In short, not a sympathetic character.  The people in her town are gossips and un-motivated.  Her son manages to escape first to California, and then to New York.  The other men in the book seem broken and the women seem to get by mostly by being crazy and/or drunk.

It's been more (ahem) than 10 years I've lived in Boston and I can recall Wichita fondly.  I'm happy to still have close friends I grew up with; some moved away, and some stayed there.  But they're happy and successful.  I'm better able to connect with fellow midwestern ex-pats and appreciate that friendliness.  And I've come to realize that New Englanders are just as insular, if not more, than midwesterners.  The discomfort I felt reading Olive Kitteridge came from my own feeling of being sucked in to Boston.

Ms. Strout is a wonderful writer. Her scenes and characters are evocative to a fault.  So it's not the writing, but the subject matter.  Last spring I met a woman in my neighborhood and upon telling her that we like to recruit a geographically diverse housestaff to my hospital, her response, "But why would that matter?" seemed to summarize my overall frustration with Olive Kitteridge.

Netflix stars: 3/5.

The Elegance of the Hedgehog

Recommended to me, and with a very long wait at the library, The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery seemed like a sure fire hit for me.  It's also French!  But it just never really took off.  The main protagonists, a French concierge in a fancy apartment complex and the 12 year old daughter of a pair of inhabitants, are both philosophical and literary snobs. The concierge, Madame Michel, pretends to hold up the stereotype of the concierge-- lazy, uneducated and with little interest beyond her tv.  Paloma is a smart girl, but hides from her family, who she thinks are ridiculous.  It was hard for me to figure out why both these characters were playing so miserable and it wasn't until late in the book the reader is clued in.

Part of my issues with this might have been the poor translation.  The basic sentence structure was at times awkward, and there names and places that just didn't translate at all to the American audience.  I'm a patient reader and it takes a lot for me to not give a book a full chance, but if I had to do it again, I probably wouldn't finish it.  But I did and it partly redeemed itself, so I'm giving it 2 stars.  Read at your own risk.

A Short History of Women

Everyone loves hearing stories about their grandparents.  They lived difficult lives (World Wars, the Depression), astonishing lives (world travel when Europe was quaint and affordable), had love lives (meeting by post, starting farms in desolate lands).  Our grandmas came of age when women didn't have a lot of rights.  My own grandma was born just one year after women gained the right to vote.  During WWII she worked as a riveter and later joined my grandfather running a furniture store.  A few decades earlier women were making huge strides.  My sister read a book about Trudy Ederle, the first women to swim the English Channel.  Coco Before Chanel is the story of Coco Chanel and how she became stylish and famous by pure grit and determination.
But not all women created worldwide impacts.  Kate Walbert's novel A Short History of Women tells of four generations of women who try to make a difference, but just as easily are forgotten.  Dorothy Townsend is a 19th century suffragette who dies during a hunger strike.  Her children are sent away and their children barely know the sacrifice she made.  Her daughter Evelyn is an accomplished chemist, but is taught during a time when women are told to keep their work private, lest men find out and get jealous.  Her niece Dorothy resists authority late in life by taking photos at an off-limits military base-- only to have her own daughter apologize in shame. 
Ms. Townsend's novel reminded me of the loneliness of The Hours.  These were stories about women trying to Do Something, even if it came at a cost. We know our grandmas, and we know Marie Curie, Amelia Earhart, Indira Gandhi, Virginia Woolf and Hillary.  But this book reminded me of all the unrecognized women who made/make sacrifices.  When there is an election and I vote, I know it's because of them that I can.
5/5 netflix stars