Who is Kent Haruf?

A Colorado writer, author of a handful of thrilling novels with fragile beauty crossed with chills of melancholy. Whether in the Song of the Plains, Colorado Blues or The People of Holt County and Our Souls at Night - the last one, which interests us today - the characters are shaken by huge griefs and little whispered whims, lest the wind or gossip should scatter them to the four corners of the plain. Kent Haruf died in 2014, a few months before the publication in the United States of Our Souls at Night.

What is his novel about?

Addie is a seventy-year-old widow who can no longer stand her solitude, imposed by what will be said and the fundamentalists of the Bible, in a small town in the West. One day, she rings with her neighbor, who is also a widower, and makes this "indecent" proposition: to spend the night at her place from time to time, to speak and "hold her hand" in the darkness ... where suddenly everything cleared up, words freed like confessions of buried secrets.

But still ?

Evidently, little by little these mysterious and unexpected things, called love, are born between these two graying angels. But is it possible for old people to be as close as possible when the city and the indignant son join together to put an end to this scandalous attack on good manners, as if it were a glaucous decal of Pornohub?

Why does it do good when it hurts?

And why do so many readers offer this book? Because the romantic couple Louis and Addie is the most beautiful since that formed by Clint Eastwood and Meryl Streep in the film On the Road to Madison. Because, too, the posthumous work of Kent Haruf gives the desire to go to the end of his dreams towards and against all. To lead his life without taking into account the dictates and threats and the good-thinking. A message heavy with meaning in our times where the dark clouds of intolerance and fanaticism accumulate.

An extract, end point

"The kid was asleep. The dog raised the head of the pillow, looked at Louis and then lay down again. In Addie's room Louis held his hand through the half-open window to collect the rain dripping from the eaves, and then, returning to the bed, passed his wet hand over Addie's velvety cheek. "

Our souls the night of Kent Haruf, translated from English (United States) by Anouk Neuhoff, ed. Robert Laffont, 18 €.