Life and death. Simply and beautifully penned. May you rest in peace, Mr. Haruf. We've loved your stories well. The wind still blows. That doesn't change.

What is it that really matters when the light of our lives gradually fades out to complete and utter darkness? When we face loss and inevitable extinguishment?Using the fictional town of Holt in the high plains of Colorado as a setting, Kent Haruf builds a finely threaded fabric of stories that place emphasis on the courage and the compassion of ordinary people when confronted with everyday tragedies of daily life. An old man is diagnosed with terminal cancer and is forced to face certain aspect...

When I was a teenager and a young woman and the world got me down, I would crack open a Carson McCullers novel and restore my faith in humanity and find myself able to return to our imperfect world.In between my twenties and my forties, I discovered many amazing novels, but none which quite captured the McCullers effect for me, until I recently found Kent Haruf.Kent Haruf is a Colorado writer who writes of small town people and their slow, often infuriatingly slow speech, but his writing superce...

Kent Haruf takes his time. His first novel, The Ties That Bind, was published in 1984, winning a Whiting Foundation Award and a Hemingway Foundation/PEN citation. His second novel, Where You Once Belonged was published in 1990. Plainsong, which became a best-seller and was a National Book Award finalist, was published in 1999. It's sequel, Eventide, was published in 2004. Nine years later we have Haruf's fifth novel, Benediction. All his novels are set in the fictional town of Holt, Colorado, (a...

This final book in the series — with new characters— is the darkest in the trilogy. Yet... there are a few very funny scenes. One in particular involving a naked opportunity is as hilarious as it is sad. ‘Benediction’ is an all-encompassing emotional ride from beginning to end. The story pulled me into the small, intimate world of characters I enjoyed getting to know. A spiral of tragedies left me reeling. It’s not a light read, by any means, but a moving and thoughtful one not easy to forget. W...

I believe that Kent Haruf is such a beloved author because he makes us see "the precious ordinary". There is such beauty in ordinary lives and everyday conversation and all the little minutia that lives are formed of, but it seems so commonplace that we forget to look. Beauty in the slant of light coming through the window at a certain time of day, or a sudden, brief rainstorm to clear the air and cool things off. Beauty in a job well done, and kind neighbors in a small town, and people making t...

Lost, Estranged, Adopted, Reconciled? “You don’t get over it… when a child goes. You never do.”The greatest pain is not from one’s own inevitable death, or even the loss of a beloved partner (both of which feature), but from separation of children and parents.Most of these characters are coping with such loss, whether through death, estrangement, or missing the opportunity to have a child. A few regain or attain some sort of parent/child relationship. Generally mothers and daughters fare better...

When stopped one night on a dark outside street, a character in Haruf's haunting, beautiful novel is asked: "What are you doing out here?" And he replies, after some confusion about what it is he's doing, that he is simply looking at "The precious ordinary." This moment lept out to me as the heart of this novel, as its entire message distilled down to one simple line. The precious ordinary. This is what Haruf writes. In all his novels he shines his own brand of lamplight on the beautiful edges o...

This one made for a very satisfying return for me to the fictional rural community of Holt in the high plains of Colorado. As in his other books, we are treated to the stories of ordinary people struggling to make the most of their lives in the face of the unfulfilled dreams or lost people, all rendered in a spare prose and understated but rich dialog. People who try to rectify their past mistakes. And take the time to rejoice at the simple pleasures from the company of family and friends and th...

Benediction is a pensive novel about the dailiness of life in a small town, the neighborly kindnesses as well as the regrets and missed chances that haunt its residents. At times it's more a lament than a benediction. "Dad" Lewis is the central character. He only has a few weeks left to live. Knowing this makes him treasure events and places that once seemed ordinary and unspecial. As his life draws to a close, he allows himself to revert to a childlike authenticity. He finally tells people what...

Benediction is a book I experienced as tender, gentle, and like a deeply moving ballad resonating in the key of life.The lives depicted are ordinary lives expressed with extraordinary compassion and understanding in how people think, feel, and experience their shared existence.The key families in the story, whose lives intertwine and overlap, include a family with one member in the last stages of life, a family with a grandmother doing her best to care for her orphaned young grand-daughter, a fa...

12/01/2014 – Kent Haruf…you chronicled my eastern Colorado roots so brilliantly that I personally knew those folks from “Holt”. May you rest in peace.Kent Haruf’s writing style is so eloquent, spare and beautiful. As with Plainsong, this novel’s setting is in Holt, an imaginary small town on the High Plains of eastern Colorado. I’m a native of this part of Colorado so I’m very familiar with these folks and their quiet but compelling stories. It starts slowly as Haruf introduces the reader to som...

Benediction - the utterance or bestowing of a blessing at the end of a service, or in this case a life. For we are told immediately that Dad Lewis has cancer and will soon die, and what we get after that revelation is exactly what he gets, a chance to review his life, to see where he went wrong and right; and to see what he leaves behind him, the life that will still move forward when he is gone.Kent Haruf is such an amazing writer! He can get inside the minds and hearts of his characters in suc...

Benediction - the third book in the Plainsong trilogy by the masterful Kent Haruf is my favourite. That’s saying something because Plainsong and Eventide were magnificent stories. They both involved my favourite McPheron brothers – two men I’d like to know.Benediction is set in Holt County, but it doesn’t follow on directly from the previous books, we are introduced to new characters. Importantly, the mood and nicely paced writing is still there.The author takes us on a journey of personal regre...

The entire time I was reading this book I could not get a line from Max Ehrmann's Desiderata out of my head: "Speak your truth quietly and clearly, and listen to others; even the dull and ignorant, they too have their story." Benediction is the story of a nobody, really. Just a fellow who labored at the same job for half a century, raised a small semi-dysfunctional family, and then became ill. We all know someone like Dad Lewis: most of us will know several people like him. Entire city block...

Another absorbing read. Such a deceptively simple story, filled with meaning and love. I will miss never having another Kent Haruf book to read.

Sitting on a comfortable straight-backed chair, hearing the solitary tick of an ancient kitchen wall clock, in a sun-drenched room in a 150-year-old clapboard house on a dead-end street in a town where everybody’s known you since you were born. That’s what Kent Haruf’s work feels like to me. Spare, haunting, dense with feeling. “The precious ordinary,” he calls it. I love his books. I love his writing. I think I love him.

I will read anything this man writes. He can capture our universal humanity way down at a soul level. His eloquent, unobtrusive, sparse prose leads the reader from one carefully drawn scene to the next. He just lays out his story and lets the reader come along for the ride. No words, phrases, or concepts are tortured in this process.The Lewis family faces the death of their patriarch with as much dignity as they can. Their regrets and accomplishments mix together into an acceptance of a life liv...

ETA 11/30/14: RIP to Kent Haruf. Your wisdom, gentleness, and wit will be dearly missed. "And death shall have no dominion . . ."Holt, Colorado – a blunt-edged town on the eastern edge of Colorado’s high and dry plains – where time ticks like the cooling engine of car. Storms build in billowing clouds on the horizon, summers grind through with breathless heat, winters drive ice and snow from across the flat middle of the country. It is as it has always been. It seems so little changes in this qu...

A book about a father dying of terminal cancer. He is dying at home, in our times and in the author’s fictional town of Holt, Colorado. A hospital milieu is not part of this book. The book is about the process of dying and how this affects all involved. How do you think I am feeling as I complete this book? It doesn’t take much to imagine. Sad, and there are tears in my eyes. A man has died, and I am grieving. That says all you really need to know. Obviously, the characters have become real to m...