That consummate novelist Elizabeth Strout has created many memorable characters, among them Lucy Barton and Olive Kitteridge. Lucy has grown up in an atmosphere of desperate poverty and marked eccentricity, but eventually becomes a successful writer. Olive, who is older, has been a high school teacher: she has an abrasive personality, but is unflinchingly honest. In Tell Me Everything, Strout’s tenth novel, published last year, Olive and Lucy, both living in the American state of Maine, tell each other true stories. Both are keen observers, and both are concerned with what they term unrecorded lives.
Unrecorded lives are one of my concerns, too, which is one reason I read Strout’s novels, and the main reason I wrote, long ago, about my Greek mother-in-law, with whom I had (inevitably) an edgy relationship. Daughter of an Orthodox priest and widow of another, she was the completely traditional village woman. She wore top-to toe black, and was illiterate, but skilled in numerous other areas of which I was abysmally ignorant, such as cheese and soap making and weaving. She raised six children against a background of poverty and war, while losing others to disease. As a friend said, Aphrodite, with her knowledge and fortitude, would have been capable of crawling out of a nuclear fallout shelter and starting again, whereas there would have been no fresh start for me.
At some stage I realised that Aphrodite was part of a generation that was vanishing quite quickly; it was then that I started making notes and writing. And I’m still doing this, really, for there are unrecorded lives all around us. Strout makes the point that all ordinary lives are in fact extraordinary, and I tend to agree. Lucy says that ‘we are all such mysteries,’ and I tend to agree with that notion, too.
I walk a few kilometres every day, and of course see all kinds of sights and all kinds of people as part of this daily routine. Some years ago, I noticed an older man who was walking in a very determined fashion and at a fairly quick pace. He was wearing a black armband, a reliable sign of bereavement in older Greek men, so I assumed he was a widower. I saw him often, and in various places, so that it became obvious that he was in the habit of walking considerable distances. Eventually I spoke to him, and then felt a sharp pang, for it became obvious that he has had an operation for cancer of the throat and so has to apply a kind of speech device to a space in his neck. But he was quite relaxed about this and unselfconscious about the rasping sound the device produces, and when I commented on his walking, he told me that he sometimes notches up about 90km in a week.
'Questions are asked: what does anyone’s life mean? What is the point of anybody’s life? Lucy asks the questions, and Olive provides her answer, which involves working hard and helping people.'
Some time later I moved into town and am now close to the beach and the promenade that stretches beside it. And I began to see this man more often. On the promenade he has a different routine: at a certain point he scatters large crumbs for the seagulls and pigeons, and at the end of the prom, where there is a large parking space, he feeds numerous cats, which clearly know to expect him at a certain time each morning. We have had another chat and wave at each other every now and then. We know nothing about each other, but I admire his persistence and the way in which he structures his day. And, like Johnnie Walker, he keeps on.
Closer to home, the widow across the street keeps an eye on me. At first, I assumed she was older than I, but no: it’s just that she has had a difficult life. Widowed when her elder child was six, she did not remarry but worked hard to raise her children: she now has three grandchildren of whom she is very proud. It is clear that her faith has kept her going: we will manage with the help of God and the Panagia, she tells me at regular intervals. She is solicitous about my health and gives me exotic olives: her son is an oil taster and sends large juicy olives from northern Greece. We engage in lively conversations in the street.
Thoughts to ponder emerge, but not at all obtrusively, in Strout’s work. Life is hard, but people, especially those with emotional reserves, just live it. Questions are asked: what does anyone’s life mean? What is the point of anybody’s life? Lucy asks the questions, and Olive provides her answer, which involves working hard and helping people. Lucy says that Russian writer Solzhenitsyn believed that the point of life was to achieve maturity of the soul. It seems to me that the walker and the widow have both done this.
Gillian Bouras is an expatriate Australian writer who has written several books, stories and articles, many of them dealing with her experiences as an Australian woman in Greece.