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Benediction (Vintage Contemporaries), by Kent Haruf
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Review
“His finest-tuned tale yet. . . . There is a deep, satisfying music to this book, as Haruf weaves between such a large cast of characters in so small a space. . . . Strangely, wonderfully, the moment of a man's passing can be a blessing in the way it brings people together. Benediction recreates this powerful moment so gracefully it is easy to forget that, like [the town of] Holt, it is a world created by one man.” —John Freeman, The Boston Globe"A quiet and profound statement about endings, about change and death and endurance, and about the courage it takes to finally let go. . . . What's remarkable is Haruf's ability, once again, to square quotidian events with what it means to be alive and bound in ordinary pleasure with ordinary people [with] a matter-of-fact tone, with spare declarative sentences and plain-speak among the characters that is, in its bare-bones clarity, often heartbreakingly authentic." —Debra Gwartney, The Oregonian“What Haruf makes of this patch of ground is magic [and] Benediction spreads its blessing over the entire town. Haruf isn’t interested in evil so much as the frailties that defeat us – loneliness, a failure to connect with one another, the lack of courage to change. . . . [He] makes us admire his characters’ ability not only to carry on but also to enjoy simple pleasures.” —Dan Cryer, San Francisco Chronicle“We’ve waited a long time for an invitation back to Holt, home to Kent Haruf’s novels. . . He may be the most muted master in American fiction [and] Benediction seems designed to catch the sound of those fleeting good moments [with] scenes Hemingway might have written had he survived.” —Ron Charles, Washington Post"A lovely book, surprisingly rich in character and event without any sense of being crowded. . . . Haruf is a master in summing up the drama that already exists in life, if you just pay attention." —Harper Barnes, St. Louis Post-Dispatch“Absorbing [and] evocative. . . . Haruf doesn’t offer us any facile reconciliations. The blessings in Benediction are [not] easily won. For that very reason they are all the more believable and all the more unforgettable.” – Richard Wakefield, The Seattle Times"Splendid. . . . As the expertly crafted structure of Benediction emerges, it becomes clear that [Haruf's many] characters trace the arc of a life. . . as we join [a good but flawed man] in his deepening appreciation for those around him, while counting down the remaining hours, in his life and our own." —Mike Fischer, Portland Press Herald“Remarkable. . . . Haruf paints indelible portraits of drifting days that reveal unexpected blessings. . . . We may not always recognize the best moments—maybe because they are often as simple as eating off the good china at a backyard picnic—but he understands their power to make us human.” —Connie Ogle, The Miami Herald"Itself a blessing. . . spare and unencumbered. . . . Haruf's great skill is in describing the plain ways of people who live in small places [and the war] going on between good and evil that we recognize as part of our nature. This is what makes Benediction a universal story, not a hometown tale." —Michael D. Langan, The Buffalo News“Quiet, and intimate, and beautiful.” —Lisa McLendon, The Wichita Eagle “If Hemingway had had more soul, he would've written a book like Benediction.” —Emma Broder, The Chicago Maroon"Incisive, elegiac, and rhetorically rich. . . his finest expression yet of an aesthetic vision that, in spite of its exacting verisimilitude, achieves a mythic dimension rare in contemporary fiction. . . . Haruf's art is rigorous but transparent. Scene after scene, we appreciate that we are in the hands of a master of complex storytelling disguised as simple observation. . . . Reading [him], I am often reminded of the great Russian realists, who have a similar compressed intensity and who spent much of their writing time examining the lives of ordinary people living in small communities in wide-open spaces." —Kevin Stevens, The Dublin Review of Books“Benediction suggests there’s no end to the stories Haruf can tell about Holt or to the tough, gorgeous language he can summon in the process.” —Paul Elie, The New York Times Book Review “Haruf is the master of what one of his characters calls 'the precious ordinary'. . . . With understated language and startling emotional insight, he makes you feel awe at even the most basic of human gestures.” —Ben Goldstein, Esquire“Grace and restraint are abiding virtues in Haruf's fiction, and they resume their place of privilege in his new work. . . . For readers looking for the rewards of an intimate, meditative story, it is indeed a blessing.” —Karen R. Long, The Cleveland Plain Dealer“Haruf is maguslike in his gifts. . . to illuminate the inevitable ways in which tributary lives meander toward confluence. . . . Perhaps not since Hemingway has an American author triggered such reader empathy with so little reliance on the subjectivity of his characters. . . . [This] is a modestly wrought wonder from one of our finest living writers.” —Bruce Machart, The Houston Chronicle“Both sad and surprisingly uplifting in its honest and skillful examination of death, families and friendship.” —Jason Swensen, Deseret News“As Haruf's precise details accrue, a reader gains perspective: This is the story of a man's life, and the town where he spent it, and the people who try to ease its end. . . . His sentences have the elegance of Hemingway's early work [and his] determined realism, which admits that not all of our past actions or the reasons behind them are knowable, even to ourselves, is one of the book's satisfactions.” —John Reimringer, The Minneapolis Star-Tribune“Reverberant… From the terroir and populace of his native American West, the author of Plainsong and Eventide again draws a story elegant in its simple telling and remarkable in its authentic capture of universal human emotions.” – Brad Hooper, Booklist
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About the Author
Kent Haruf is the author of five previous novels (and, with the photographer Peter Brown, West of Last Chance). His honors include a Whiting Foundation Writers’ Award, the Mountains & Plains Booksellers Award, the Wallace Stegner Award, and a special citation from the PEN/Hemingway Foundation; he was also a finalist for the National Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the New Yorker Book Award. He died in November 2014, at the age of seventy-one.
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Product details
Series: Vintage Contemporaries
Paperback: 272 pages
Publisher: Vintage (January 14, 2014)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0307950425
ISBN-13: 978-0307950420
Product Dimensions:
5.1 x 0.7 x 8 inches
Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review:
4.2 out of 5 stars
588 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#54,646 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
In the first page "Dad" Lewis learns his cancer can't be stopped. We watch him reflect on some key relationships as he fades. Although there is death and broken relationships in the first two books of the Plain Song trilogy, this last book is the darkest.
"By the beginning of September the dirt would be piled over what was leftof him out at the cemetery three miles east of town, Someone would cut his name into the face of a tombstone and it would be as if he nevel was." [p 5]In Plainsong and Eventide we mostly see people who have chances at relationship with others and take them - or at least move toward the new. Dad won't be able to do that. His one true love, his wife was his luck and allowed him to build a better life after leaving an abusive home as a young teen. The husband and wife relationship is all we expect from the Kent Haruf novels. Even though she ends up in the hospital with exhaustion, she walks away and miles back home to take care of her dying husband.Although everyone calls him "Dad" he hasn't always been the loving dad - but more the stern dad. Talking with his daughter, Lorraine we see the situation in a nutshell.
You know how much they think of you.Well, I think a lot of them too. But they never say much, do they, They never say much to me.You don't let people, Daddy. You never have.You think that's what it is?Yes, I do. [p 160]Like the other two books in the series we also get looks into the lives of other inhabitants of Holt, Colorado; many of whom have parallel struggles: mother and daughter Alene; the little girl Alice across the street, and the the new minister and his troubled family. Some take the opportunity for relationship regardless of the cost; others pass.In the three novels, Haruf urges us to take chances on opening our hearts with other people. In the two earlier stories the McPheron brothers opened their lives to Victoria and her daughter; later Raymond McPheron finds romantic love. Dad Lewis found love and luck with his wife but unfortunately not in some of the other big relationship events in his life. We do see him trying to change; which is hopeful.Benediction is a nice counterpoint to the other two novels. I don't recommend starting here; work your way through the series from the start.
Holt, Colorado, is a very ordinary little town invented by Haruf for the setting of his three novels Plainsong, Eventide and Benediction. It’s the kind of sleepy, unattractive little place that we have all read about in literature and seen portrayed in endless films; the kind of place, in real life, you just couldn’t wait to get away from. And yet, this is what makes Haruf’s work so exceptional. He has the ability to make the ordinary into something completely extraordinary and creates a fictional place that you just can’t wait to get back to.Benediction tells the story of one long, hot summer in Holt, when Dad Lewis returns from hospital with terminal cancer. He has come home to die which he duly does at the end of the novel. That’s it. That’s the story and yet I don’t think I’ve read anything recently that kept me so avidly turning the pages. Alongside the very sad story of Dad’s decline there are sub-plots which are completely uplifting, for example Dad’s next door neighbour takes in Alice, her orphaned eight-year-old granddaughter, and the rather shell-shocked child gradually grows in confidence as she is befriended by a group of older women.Haruf’s characters are uncompromisingly true to life. These are the folk you might expect to meet in typical small town America – conventional and small-minded with a tough outlook born of poverty and grinding hard work. Even the central character, Dad Lewis, upright citizen though he may be, is not likeable. His uncompromising moral standards have caused him to sack an employee who stole money from him, leading ultimately to the man’s suicide and his wife and children facing a life of desperate poverty. He has also alienated his son because he cannot cope with the fact that his offspring is homosexual. And yet, in all Hanuf’s characters, there are such flashes of courage and compassion that you are left feeling optimistic rather than depressed by the state of mankind. Dad Lewis, in penance for his over-hasty judgement, financially supports his ex-employee’s wife and children for years. The same folk who turn their back on Reverend Lyle for preaching that the United States should “turn the other cheek†instead of going to war in Afghanistan and Iraq, turn out en masse to hunt for a missing child. Hanuf makes you care about his characters, despite their flaws and I, for one, want to go back there to find out how life works out for Alice as she grows up and whether Lorraine does take over the hardware store.Haruf’s style of writing is deceptively simple; he uses no imagery and his characters’ conversation is plain and natural, the ordinariness emphasised by the lack of quotation marks. This simplicity of style serves to make even more memorable certain scenes, such as the women’s baptism-like skinny dipping in the cattle’s stock tank or the terrifying account of the minister’s son attempting to hang himself. These are dramatic scenes, loaded with symbolic significance but it is Hanuf’s accounts of very ordinary events that make his work so powerful. Reverend Lyle goes out wandering the town looking for what he calls “the precious ordinary†in the lives of the townspeople of Holt and, at the end of the novel, the reader is left with a sense of being given an exceptional gift in being allowed access to their unexceptional lives.
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