2024-04-09 19:29:51
Oscar Mondadori brings the “Plain Trilogy” Of Kent Haruf, following an agreement with NN, the independent publisher that had it in its catalog until today. The translation is entrusted Fabio Cremonesi. In May, again by Mondadori, a new edition of “Our souls at night” will also be released, a novel unrelated to the trilogy but still set in the imaginary town of Holt, Colorado.
This is an excellent opportunity to rediscover one of the great literary successes of the last decade. Originally published between 2015 and 2016, the three novels of the “Plain Trilogy”, in the order “Song of the Plains”, “Twilight” and “Blessing“, allow the reader to embark on a beautiful journey into a peripheral humanity, often suffering, but also full of feelings, generosity and passion. The microcosm created by Haruf, a writer often compared to the greats of American literature, from Faulkner a Hemingway to the most recent Carveris that of a community delineated in a very precise way, in its emotional and family relationships but also in its geography, of streets, shops, farms, a community besieged on all sides by American nature, by the large spaces also described by McChartyamong others.
Unlike the author of “Blood Meridian” and “The Passenger”, however, here we do not have the epic and surreal violence of the frontier. The inhabitants of Holt, with their ordinary lives as farmers, university students, drunkards, single mothers, social workers, children raised in a very distracted way, are told in a tone that is both sympathetic and incredibly light.
Haruf feels affection for them, this is evident: but he doesn’t show it. The writing remains modest, dry, even when he recounts situations that would lend themselves to the use of a certain sentimental rhetoric. Let’s take one of the episodes on which the saga is based, and which we find from one book to another: a pregnant sixteen-year-old, kicked out of her home by her mother, is welcomed by two old brothers, two taciturn cattle breeders who live alone, in the plain, the days always the same, marked by the rhythms of work on the ranch. Few words are said, there are no ulterior motives behind this situation, nor even “other” religious motivations.
Only mirroring needs that meet, on the one hand Victoria’s to be welcomed, to have shelter, on the other that of the McPheron brothers to make space in their lives for something new, which brings warmth and comparison. It is the miracle of a new family being created, crooked, perhaps, but real. And the good done, the writer seems to tell us, sooner or later is returned: the relationships that have been created resist even the inevitable separations to which life forces us with its passing, to geographical distance. Other times the stories told are harsher.
The specters of poverty, ignorance, addictions, child abuse, loneliness appear. The toll of lives that didn’t always go as they could have, the regret for wasted opportunities. The same “Our souls at night”, which depicts a friendship between two elderly people, from which physical desire is excluded, but which does not for this reason escape people’s censorious morality, in the end is anything but consolatory. And yet you end reading these novels with a sense of fullness, and despite everything of confidence. In the possibility of people building bonds, the only antidote, perhaps, to the advancing frost.
2024-04-09 19:29:51