The Optimist's Daughter

Part of my relaxing Sabbath included finishing reading the above mentioned book by Eudora Welty.  With some books as I approach the end, my reading slows to savor the moments, others I just rush through to check them off my "have read" list.  With The Optimist's Daughter, the pace speed up, but not to rush toward the conclusion, but to discover the end.  The action was fairly slow.  The relationships developed in this short novel were fascinating.  Its the story of a woman dealing with death.  Laurel the title character is both tragic and hopeful in her approach.  She is essentially left completely alone.  The meat of the book deals with her process of grief through the funeral and inventorying of the house.  I'd never read Welty before that I remember, but I found her storytelling simplistic and profound.  Below are just a few passages that caught my eye.  

     The guilt of outliving those you love is justly to be borne, she thought. Outliving is something we do to them. The fantasies of dying could be no stranger than the fantasies of living. Surviving is perhaps the strangest fantasy of them all. 

     All of them wandered toward the rose bed... Sienna-bright leaves and thorns like spurts of match-flame had pierced through the severely cut-back trunk.  If it didn't bloom this year, it would next:  "That's how gardeners must learn to look at it," her mother would say.

     Memory returned like spring, Laurel thought.  Memory had the character of spring.  In some cases, it was the old wood that did the blooming.

      She ran her finger in a loving track across 'Eric Brighteyes' and 'Jane Eyre,' 'The Last Days of Pompeii' and 'Carry On, Jeeves.'  Shoulder to shoulder, they had long sence made their own family.  For every book here she had heard their voices, father's and mother's.  And perhaps it didn't matter to them, not always, what they read aloud; it was the breath of life flowing between them, and the words of the moment riding on it that held them in delight.  Between some two people every word is beautiful, or might as well be beautiful. 

Consider picking it up and transporting yourself to Mississippi for a few hours.  By the way if you needed further motivation , The Optimist's Daughter is a Pulitzer Prize winner.  

 

Just, Margaret