There are moving sequences of outings and bonding moments that exude love and comfort, a contrast to the difficult relationships experienced between closer blood relations and spouses. Addie, Louis and Jamie form a very close relationship.
OUR SOULS AT NIGHT BOOK BUY FULL
In this one, Addie’s son, Gene, has his hands full with problems at home, so sends his son, Jamie, to stay with Addie for a stretch of summer. Well, that may not be all that unconventional these days, but it still ain’t Ozzie and Harriet. Problems ensue.Ī consistent focus in Haruf’s novels is the unconventional family, whether of elderly brothers taking in a pregnant girl, or grandparents taking care of an eight-year old. Fueling his unhappiness with permanent rage about his childhood, Addie’s son, Gene, in particular, cannot tolerate his mother and Louis being together, projecting into it his fantasy that Louis is in the relationship to somehow swindle Addie out of her money. There are scenes in which they each are put on the spot and made to defend themselves to snickering locals about their arrangement. The biddies of Holt, male and female, are taken aback, of course, at the presumed impropriety, as if, once elderly and alone, it was somehow sinful to still want to have a life. Louis decides to give it a try.Īddie and Louis slowly begin to share their histories. Until Addie suggests that it would be a great help, given her trouble sleeping, if Louis would consent to sleep with her, not hide-the-salami sleep together, but sleep, and talk, in the same bed, overnight, companionship. While they have known each other for a long time, they have never been close.
Both are lonely and could do with some company. Thank you.Īnd then there was the day when Addie Moore made a call on Louis Waters.Louis and Addie are both getting on, in their 70s, Louis having lost his wife a year back, Addie a widow for some time. I am thankful for this final, perfect book-written for his wife and true love, Cathy-and her generosity in sharing it with her husband's readers. I ache for what was, what will never be again. My heart is so full of admiration and affection for Kent Haruf, his stories, his characters, his dry, dusty, flat eastern Colorado. What follows is achingly beautiful and gracious and solemn a meditation on living in the present, a requiem to the held hand. That's all you really need to know about the plot. Lying down in bed together and you staying the night. I’m talking about getting through the night, she says. One day, Addie approaches Louis and asks if he would consider coming to her house occasionally, to share her bed. In their 70s, they are both widowed and living alone with their fractured pasts. An American voice like no other."Īnd to this, I add the perfection of Our Souls at Night.Īddie Moore and Louis Waters are neighbors, familiar but not friends, in Haruf's conjured Holt, CO. Kent Haruf is the author I take to other countries, pressing his name into the ears of readers not familiar with his work.
And I come full circle, to mourn a cherished voice silenced by disease and death. I weep for all the stories we will never witness. I weep for aging bodies, for small, mean minds that do such damage, for the elderly, forgotten and alone. Even now, thinking of endings, of the ending of this book, the ending of an author I adore, I weep. I read Our Souls at Night in one sitting and wept in the final pages. Our Souls at Night is simply, profoundly, an exquisite homage to love. Despite knowing his life was coming to a sooner end than it should, or perhaps because of this, he created a story about finding love in the final chapter. Kent Haruf wrote Our Souls at Night under a death sentence. Haruf lived with his wife, Cathy, in Salida, Colorado, with their three daughters. Holt is loosely based on Yuma, Colorado, an early residence of Haruf in the 1980s. In 2006, Haruf was awarded the Dos Passos Prize for Literature.Īll of his novels are set in the fictional town of Holt, Colorado. His novel, The Tie That Binds, received a Whiting Foundation Award and a special citation from the Pen/Hemingway Foundation. Plainsong was also a finalist for the 1999 National Book Award. Haruf is the author of Plainsong, which received the Mountains and Plains Booksellers Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Maria Thomas Award in Fiction, and The New Yorker Book Award. For two years, he taught English in Turkey with the Peace Corps and his other jobs have included a chicken farm in Colorado, a construction site in Wyoming, a rehabilitation hospital in Colorado, a hospital in Arizona, a library in Iowa, an alternative high school in Wisconsin, and universities in Nebraska and Illinois. He received his Bachelors of Arts in literature from Nebraska Wesleyan University in 1965 and his Masters of Fine Arts from the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa in 1973.
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