Eventide

Sometimes in life you find yourself lost and alone. If you are fortunate, you get another chance. That second chance gives you a better appreciation of your luck. The old bachelor McPheron brothers played a secondary role in Plainsong - the first book in this series. The twins are the center of this book. They became ranchers of their place at 17 when their parents were killed. They'd been together ever since with no wives or girlfriends. Ranching is all they know. In Plainsong they take in an abandoned teen, Victoria Roubideaux.When Eventide picks up the story she is ready to move to Ft Collins for college. She will leave them more lonely than they were when she came into their lives: Raymond tells her "'We're going to miss you too, he said. We'll be about like old played-out workhorses once you're gone. Standing around lonesome, always looking over the fence.'" [p 4] Later Raymond and Victoria are talking on the phone when Victoria is feeling a little homesick. Raymond tells her how much his brother misses Victoria and her daughter "and as he went on in this vein it was clear to the girl that he was talking as much about himself as he was his brother and she felt so moved by this knowledge she was afraid she was going to cry." [p 43] I admit I teared up at this.Haruf knows ranching; his set pieces are clear and dramatic. I love the chapter about the cattle auction with the brothers bringing their cattle in for sale and then sitting through all the auction waiting to see how well they will come out. In another scene they are separating the cows from their calves. It's like we are there. Later, Tom Guthrie and his sons help out at the ranch and once the cattle are separated, one of the sons notes how the cows and calves, separated by a fence: "They make an awful amount of noise, Ike said. They don't seem to like it much." [p 153] The father responded "they never do like it, he said. I can't imagine anything or anybody that would like it. But every living thing in this world gets weaned eventually." [p 153] This theme of loneliness reaches every part of the story; even cows and calves end up alone.Raymond and Harold were the best part of the excellent Plainsong; they get a thorough treatment in this book. Sometimes in fiction you have various characters who all sound the same - not here. They have a collective distinctive voice (if that makes sense) sounding nothing like the other characters in the book. All the characters are distinct.Similar to Plainsong we follow different families in snapshot fashion as they work their ways through problems. It opens with two ineffective parents trying to manage life while being beset and overmatched by their relative Hoyt. There is also DJ a middle school student taking care of his grandfather; and the neighbor girl he bonds with. I can't say more without revealing too much.The book was a bit slow the first few pages as we are dropped into these lives with little in the way of introduction. But once Haruf gets out on the ranch with the McPheron brothers I was hooked. I read all but the first 30 pages in one day - I sat in my chair and read; took a break for lunch, then read some ore; later tore myself away to swim some laps but came right back to read more; then we had to take a break to have dinner with friends. Finally I got back home and read until I finished about midnight.Without being extensively plot driven, this is an exquisite book with realistic characters dealing with what life doles out. I love this book; it takes me back to Terms of Endearment which I read in the early 1980s. I count that novel as one of the best/favorite books I've ever read; Eventide matches it. Come for the McPheron brothers and stay for the whole story.Read it.

I just read my second Kent Haruf novel: Eventide. (The first was Plainsong). I've rarely experienced a writer who implies themes so subtly, i.e., who simply suggests themes through the actions and the dialogue of the characters. (And, except for Mark Twain, I've never experienced another writer for whom dialogue itself is so like a principal character). To me, Haruf's unifying theme is love -- first and foremost, the love of the McPheron brothers for each other and for their young friend Victoria and her little daughter Katie -- love that amounts to salvation:"Who are they? Your uncles?We're not related that way, Victoria said. They saved me two years ago when I needed help so badly. That's why they're here.They're preachers, you mean.No. They're not preachers. But they did save me. I don't know what I would have done without them. And nobody better say a word against them.I've been saved too, the girl said. I praise Jesus every day of my life.That's not what I meant, Victoria said. I wasn't talking about that at all."Kent Haruf was a lovely writer -- creating lyrical, musical novels by using plain language to depict plain landscapes and plain people and life as it is.

Kent Haruf writes beautifully. This follow up novel to Plainsong is still located in the high plains of Colorado in the farming town of Holt and many of the old characters return, with some new ones as well.This was hard to read in that it is one of the saddest books I've ever read. Children and old people doing it very tough, along with some in the middle. Some kind of tragedy or trauma affects most all of the characters in different, but powerful ways. They will stay with me for a very long time. It will take me a while to go on to the third and final novel in this series. Kent Haruf and his elegant writing are sadly missed.

This is the second book of a three-book series, and I had not previously read the first. Very, very rarely would I invest my money or my time in the middle of a series, but something about the book description interested me enough to give it a try. You asked me whether the book had met my expectations. Well it met both my expectations and all my hopes. It is a sad, beautiful, heart-breaking, and heart-warming book. I defy any reader not to be drawn into it.It is, in a sense, a capsule biography of a town told through multiple perspectives. In less skilled hands such an approach can be annoying (who was that character again? why are we leaving characters whom we like to write about less appealing ones? what does this person have to do with the plot-line we were just reading?) None of that applies here. The story is absolutely coherent, and everything applies. While it is also beautifully written, for me its greatest strength was in characterization. Days after finishing the book I found myself thinking and wondering about the characters I had just met--and not just the more attractive ones.Needless to say, I have since bought and read the other two books in the series. And they were equally wonderful.While the third book was exactly and beautifully what the title said, a final blessing on the town, I found myself just a tiny bit disappointed here. The first two books focused on different characters, but the second still brought the reader up to date on the characters of the first, a fact I was glad of. There is a greater lapse of time between the setting of the second book and that of the third, so the characters I had grown to love so well were almost entirely missing. And "missing" is the appropriate word; I did miss them. Still this is my failing and not the author's. And the fact of a new cast of characters drives home the point that we are learning of a town and not just the specific stories of particular characters.I strongly recommend the whole series to all readers.

I'm so happy I found him ,but how frustrating that there must be so many other undiscovered writers out there that we may never find .He has been compared to John Steinbeck , I can see that , he's another of my favourite authors, ha also writes sparse , unadorned narrative , like him Haruf's characters and landscapes are recognisable and true .These are authors others can only hope to emulate .Just one jarring note , and this is no reflection on the author , but who on earth chose the covers for this trilogy ? They look misleadingly like chick lit . A good cover reflects the quality of the contents , these don't .

This, the second in the Plainsong trilogy, is a bit more painful to read, almost from the very beginning. So many of the characters are dealt a poor hand in life. Some manage to rise above it, while others sink slowly ever deeper. Despite that, the individuals' stories are beautifully written, and give hope that those who struggle in life honorably can get their just desserts. I did find myself cringing as I got closer and closer to the end, hoping against further personal disasters and crises for the characters I had warmed to.The third book in the trilogy is scheduled to be delivered late and I'm impatient to get it started.

This is the second volume of the trilogy of which Plainsong (see my review) is the first. It has the same great qualities and follows much the same pattern as its predecessor: minute observations of rather ordinary events, alternating with gripping episodes, and always, possibly to excess, there is the presence of the mostly wintry weather and the landscape. There is so much human warmth and compassion in Haruf’s writing. The most important of his characters are good and loving people, without being in any way saccharine; the children he writes about are not very articulate, but they, too, have good relationships with adults and with each other. That throws into sharp relief the one really appalling character.Two years on, we meet some of the characters of that earlier novel again. The dear old McPheron brothers are there again, now living alone again on their farm, missing Victoria, the girl they had taken in when she was a seventeen-year old pregnant girl, and who had gone to college some 125 miles away, taking her little daughter with her. But she will return to the ranch often, and remains an important presence in the book. There is the school teacher Tom Guthrie, his two boys Ike and Bobby, again helping out occasionally at the McPheron farm.We are introduced to new characters: Luther and Betty June Wallace who, with their two children, live on social security in a trailer; Betty’s delinquent uncle, Hoyt Raines (an especially vivid portrayal); D.J. Kephart, an eleven year old orphan, solemn, responsible and taciturn, who lived with his 75 year old grandfather and now looked after him rather than the other way round. He has two little friends, the daughters of sad Mary Wells whose husband had deserted her. Haruf is very good describing friendship between children. There’s Rose Tyler, a social worker, and Linda May, a hospital nurse.Nothing very much happens in Part One - mostly just vignettes, like the McPheron brothers at a cattle auction; Luther and Betty June shopping with their food stamps; a fight between boys at school; D.J. learning to ride a bicycle - all told in the sort of detail that we had in Plainsong.But then, not long after the beginning of Part Two, there is shocking drama on the cattle farm when one of the McPheron brothers dies. By this time - especially if we have read the preceding volume - we have come to care so much for the brothers that this and the grieving aftermath are really painful and moving to read. But this is a life-affirming book. The surviving brother will still have much to live for - Victoria and her little girl for one thing; but there is more: he makes new relationships of a kid he has never had before - even if I find the last of these a little unconvincingThere are other dramas:One relates to D.J.’s grandfather.There is a bad road accident.There are two harrowing incidents of child abuse; after the first of them there is an excellent account of the following court procedures; the second has distressing consequences, again movingly described.The novel is as involving as its predecessor, and it, too, ends in a slightly open-ended manner. So my next review will be about Benediction, the final book in the trilogy.

I loved this and have been thinking about it off and on for the last few weeks. It has characters that live in your mind, situations that are so painful they almost mean you have to put the book aside because you have become so invested in the characters, and an enduring sense of hope that the future could be different somehow. If you loved Plainsong you will definitely love this. If you haven’t yet read Plainsong I really would suggest starting with that because it involves many of the same characters. But it’s highly recommended.

In every way this book lives up to the promise of "Plainsong". It is equally amazing in its skill in presenting the lives of ordinary people, often taciturn like Raymond and Harold or of limited articulacy like Betty and Luther. Without lapsing into sentimentality, and with a self-effacing recording of the simple events of everyday life in a small Colorado community, Kent Haruf engages our feelings at some considerable depth. There is such a powerful sense of actuality that we are drawn slowly but relentlessly into the lives of his characters. As he never condescends towards them, neither do we. Indeed, we are often caught unawares by the depth and sharpness of feeling that his characters experience and that we share. The different ways in which they come to terms with both the challenges and the limitations of their lives is sometimes painful, often heartening and never less than fascinating. A very fine book.