Benediction
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4.3 • 4 Ratings
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
A story of life and death, family and community, set out on the high plains of Colorado.
Dad Lewis is dying. As the residents of Holt, Colorado pass in and out of his front door to voice their farewells, their prayers, their good wishes, Dad's wife and daughter work to make his final days as comfortable as possible, knowing all is tainted by the bitterness of an absent son.
In the house across the street, a young girl moves in with her grandmother and is fascinated and unsettled by the memories that Dad's condition stir up of her own family's past. And down town another new arrival, the Reverend Rob Lyle, attempts to mend strained relationships of his own, as he faces up to his latest congregation.
Benediction forms - with Plainsong and Eventide - a loose trilogy set in Haruf's fictional town of Holt, an imaginative landscape which is as vivid and powerful as those of Cormac McCarthy and Annie Proulx. Heart-breaking yet affirming, this is a novel that explores the pain, the compassion and above all the humanity of ordinary people.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Holt, the fictional Colorado town where all of Haruf's novels are set, longtime resident Dad Lewis is dying of cancer. Happily married (he calls his wife "his luck"), Dad spends his last weeks thinking over his life, particularly an incident that ended badly with a clerk in his store, and his relationship with his estranged son. As his wife and daughter care for him, life goes on: one of the Lewises' neighbors takes in her young granddaughter; an elderly woman and her middle-aged daughter visit with the Lewises, with each other, and with the new minister, whose wife and son are unhappy about his transfer to Holt from Denver. Haruf isn't interested in the trendy or urban; as he once said, he writes about "regular, ordinary, sort of elemental" characters, who speak simply and often don't speak much at all. "Regular and ordinary" can equate with dull. However, though this is a quiet book, it's not a boring one. Dad and his family and neighbors try, in small, believable ways, to make peace with those they live among, to understand a world that isn't the one in which they came of age. Separately and together, all the characters are trying to live and in Dad's case, to die with dignity, a struggle Haruf (Eventide) renders with delicacy and skill.
