Though it seemed that his career would come to an end, he reached out from beyond the grave one last time to bring us his final novel, Our Souls at Night. The story is set in the same town Haruf has used in his previous works, that of Holt, Colorado; a small town on the High Plains where everybody knows everything about everyone else.
We are introduced to two old and lonely souls: Louis Waters and Addie Moore. The former has lost his wife many years ago while his children live many hours away, and the latter is also a widower herself.
They both spend their evenings in calm loneliness, seemingly content with quietly living out the rest of their days. On a faithful evening, Addie comes up knocking to Louis' door and asks if he'd like to spend the nights with her, talking and sleeping; despite living only a block away for decades, they had never gotten to really know each other.
At first taken aback, Louis agrees and begins spending the nights at Addie's house, with their relationship progressively blossoming... much to the town's disapproval, as well as Louis' son.
In his few previous novels Haruf has shown us a prose that was more relaxed and light in nature, less loaded with heavy metaphors and imagery, and that is something which has been pursued to a greater extent in this book. The language used is rather simple, enabling the text to flow quickly and smoothly, allowing the reader to enjoy the tale rather than get bogged down in the more complex thoughts.
Of course, that is not to say the book is deprived of depth or food for thought. As you can imagine, Haruf uses this novel as a way to explore life at an old age, the relationship between old parents and their adult children, love at the end of the road, the human need for companionship, just to name a few things.
The love story between Addie and Louis is a rather unconventional one in comparison to what we're used to seeing in the genre, which is precisely what makes it so appealing. It's (almost) entirely a relationship of the mind, the spotlight placed on the psychological aspect.
We get to know these lonely souls rather intimately, and the honesty with which their lives are laid out before our eyes is captivating to say the least; though many are too young to really relate to them, their joys and pains are still acutely experienced by the reader. It's all written with such tenderness and realism that it's hard not to think of them as real people by the end of it.
It's not a sensational type of book, but it offers a deep and heartwarming story that will turn a couple of your evenings into some of the most memorable ones (at least where literature is concerned).
 | Kent Haruf |
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