Anything Is Possible
A Novel
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4.0 • 587개의 평가
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- US$7.99
출판사 설명
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • An unforgettable cast of small-town characters copes with love and loss in this “compulsively readable” (San Francisco Chronicle) novel from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Olive Kitteridge and My Name is Lucy Barton
“This book, this writer, are magnificent.”—Ann Patchett
WINNER OF THE STORY PRIZE • ONE OF BARACK OBAMA’S FAVORITE BOOKS OF THE YEAR • A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today, People, NPR, Entertainment Weekly, Newsday, The Seattle Times, Esquire, The Guardian, Kirkus Reviews, Publishers Weekly
In Anything Is Possible, Elizabeth Strout explores the whole range of human emotion through the intimate dramas of people struggling to understand themselves and others. Here are two sisters: One trades self-respect for a wealthy husband while the other finds in the pages of a book a kindred spirit who changes her life. A grown daughter longs for mother love even as she comes to accept her mother’s happiness in a foreign country. And Lucy Barton returns to visit her siblings after seventeen years of absence.
Reverberating with the deep bonds of family, and the hope that comes with reconciliation, Anything Is Possible “confirms Strout as one of our most grace-filled, and graceful, writers” (The Boston Globe).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In her latest work, Strout achieves new levels of masterful storytelling. Damaged lives can be redeemed but, as she eloquently demonstrates in this powerful, sometimes shocking, often emotionally wrenching novel, the emotional scars can last forever. If some readers felt that Strout's previous novel, My Name Is Lucy Barton, was too subtle and oblique about Lucy's hellish childhood, here Strout reveals specific details of the horrible circumstances in which Lucy and her siblings were raised, as recollected by some of the inhabitants of Amgash, Ill., and the surrounding communities. Using the novel-in-stories format of Olive Kitteridge, Strout again proves Tolstoy's observation that each family is unhappy in its own way. Except for one episode in which Lucy herself comes back for a tortured sibling reunion, she is the absent but omnipresent thread that weaves among the dozen or so characters who are have suffered secret misery and are longing for love and understanding. Some are lucky: one of the five Mumford sisters reunites with her runaway mother in Italy; another, an angry young girl, is suddenly able to see the way to a brighter future. Others, including a Vietnam veteran with PTSD and a rich woman who is complicit in her husband's depraved behavior survive despite the baggage of tortured memories. "They had grown up on shame; it was the nutrient of their soil," one character acknowledges. Strout's prose is pared down, yet rich with implication. It is left for the character in the final episode, Lucy's cousin Abel, who despite a similarly deprived childhood is now a happy and successful business executive, husband, father, and grandfather, to observe, in what may be his final moments, that "Anything was possible for anyone."
사용자 리뷰
Rambling
Difficult to follow because story changed, apparently unrelatedly. Each new chapter seemed unrelated to the previous. The final chapter was good, very interesting and unexpected.
Exquisite
“Gift,” the final story in this interlaced collection of stories, is nuanced, intelligent, beautifully rendered and extraordinarily painful. I had to take a breath before writing this.
Nothing is simple in this collection, not a tired marriage or the life of a woman who runs a B and B or a story of terrible poverty endured by children. At the same time, Strout’s luminous writing also finds a core of simplicity to the lives of her characters, moments in which we see them stand out shorn of over-complexities. All of these stories are to some degree haunting. In them we have glimpses of the variegated nature of the human condition brought to life with compassion, tenderness and great insight. Strout’s characters belong to our modern world, but her writing brings to mind that of the masters: Hawthorne, Melville, Joyce. Her work, at its best, is incandescent.
Scattered
Trying to stay this story. Halfway in still not enjoying.