Elizabeth Strout, Pullitzer 2009
Con una colección de relatos titulada Olive Kitteridge, la escritora Elizabeth Strout ganó el último premio Pullitzer en la categoría Ficción. La reseña en el NYT dice:
The presence of Olive Kitteridge, a seventh-grade math teacher and the wife of a pharmacist, links these 13 stories. A big woman, she’s like a planetary body, exerting a strong gravitational pull. Several stories put Olive at the center, but in a few she makes only a fleeting appearance. It’s no coincidence that the two weakest stories are the ones in which she is merely mentioned. Without her, the book goes adrift, as if it has lost its anchor. She isn’t a nice person. As one of the town’s older women notes, “Olive had a way about her that was absolutely without apology.” Olive’s son puts it more bluntly. “You can make people feel terrible,” he tells her. She dismisses others with words like “hellion” and “moron” and “flub-dub.” After swapping discontents, she says to a friend, “Always nice to hear other people’s problems.” But as the stories continue, a more complicated portrait of the woman emerges. Olive may hurl invectives at her son, but she also loves him, almost more than she can bear. Her husband is a kind man and she loves him too, although she has trouble expressing it. She’s prone to “stormy moods,” as well as “sudden, deep laughter,” and she harbors a sense of compassion, even for strangers. (...) The pleasure in reading “Olive Kitteridge” comes from an intense identification with complicated, not always admirable, characters. And there are moments in which slipping into a character’s viewpoint seems to involve the revelation of an emotion more powerful and interesting than simple fellow feeling — a complex, sometimes dark, sometimes life-sustaining dependency on others. There’s nothing mawkish or cheap here. There’s simply the honest recognition that we need to try to understand people, even if we can’t stand them.
Etiquetas: eeuu, NOTICIA, PREMIO, strout
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on 4.21.2009 at 9:45 a. m..
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