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The Optimist's Daughter
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The Optimist's Daughter
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The Optimist's Daughter
Audiobook (abridged)4 hours

The Optimist's Daughter

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

3.5/5

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About this audiobook

This Pulitzer Prize-winning novel tells the story of Laurel McKelva Hand, a young woman who has left the South and returns, years later, to New Orleans, where her father is dying. After his death, she and her silly young stepmother go back still farther, to the small Mississippi town where she grew up. Along in the old house, Laurel finally comes to an understanding of the past, herself, and her parents.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateApr 19, 2011
ISBN9780307941435
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The Optimist's Daughter

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Reviews for The Optimist's Daughter

Rating: 3.5320755067924527 out of 5 stars
3.5/5

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  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Three and a half stars. I guess I will steal a fellow Goodreads member's words because they perfectly sum up this book: "the atmosphere and feelings Welty creates with her words are more the plot than any event or character".

  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Clearly I am in the minority, and as an oddball Aquarian, a place I am used to being in. I hated this book, it was one giant snooze-fest for me, I could not wait until it was over.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    It's about a young (well, youngish, I'm not sure of her age) widow who comes home when her 70+ year-old father tells her he needs to see the doctor for trouble with his eyes. Her widowed father married a woman not much older than her when he was 70, and the new wife and the daughter don't get along. I found the new wife to be horrid and pretty much wanted to smack her. Well, the father goes in for eye surgery and the remainder of the book has the daughter exploring her parent's life together as well as her own short-lived marriage. I didn't find it very satisfying.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I am reading this in the beautiful leather bound signed edition with a message from the author. Rather than a few sentences, she gives us a few intimate pages relating the characters and the story to her own life. No, these are not duplicates to her life but certainly death and the impact are. Holding a treasure of American Literature also given birth and held by Ms. Welty is the best antidote for overreliance of the digital book.Ms. Welty is a superb writer of place, specifically the character and rhythm of the south. This opens in New Orleans but it is not long before we are back home in Mississippi. She also draws a picture of West Virginia and Cairo, IL where the Ohio and Mississippi rivers converge.It was nice to meet you, bridesmaids.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This started as a comedy of Old South manners but by the second half it had changed into something entirely different. It plunges the depths of how we become who we are. I would have liked it even more if the character that we were plunging into was more like myself, but I have to acknowledge innumerable numinous interpretations that is hallmark of all great literature. For a book were nothing really happens my book club went ape shit.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Extremely realistic and depressing. Bird trapped in the house is a bit too obviously symbolic. More admirable than likable. Fay is a common sight in the real world, at least in the south, but likely everywhere I'm sure.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Won the 1973 Pulizer Prize. It's a quick read about a 40ish woman returning to the south where her father is dying. There's a young step-mother to contend with and all of the friends of childhood to bring back memories and lead her to better understanding herself.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Southern story broken into four distinct sections.Part I - Laurel McKelva Hand comes from Chicago to care for her elderly father after eye surgery. Judge McKelva subsequently dies and Laurel is left to deal with her young, silly stepmother, Fay. Part I sets the tone for Laurel and Fay's strained relationship.Part II - Laurel and Fay bring Judge McKelva home for the wake and funeral where Laurel is heartily welcomed and supported by her friends and community. Fay's family comes from Texas and brings out the worst in Fay. Part II illustrates southern charm and manners.Part III - Laurel has to come to terms with her father's new, young wife. As silly as she is, Laurel's father adored her. Laurel also has to come to terms with the death of her mother ten years prior.Part IV is all about Laurel's introspective growth and acceptance of the future. The burning of her mother's letters and the letting go of the breadboard are very significant.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    A beautiful and heartbreaking and hopeful surprise, this little book is reminiscent of Mark Twain in voice and subject, though lighter in tone--a touch of Flannery O'Connor, minus the violence. The humor here, combined with the emotion, make for a surprisingly touching book, and one which might be read on a quiet day for a single afternoon's vacation. It is a quick book, but not one to be forgotten or left aside in the past. Highly recommended.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I really enjoy Southern fiction, which for me is a blend of evocative scenery, nostalgic small town communities and universal emotions. This is my first taste of Eudora Welty's writing, but 'The Optimist's Daughter' is the perfect introduction - concise, lyrical and poignant. Laurel Hand returns to her home town of Mount Salus, Mississippi, to be with her remarried father when he goes into hospital for an operation. She has to deal with her common stepmother, who has escaped her own sprawling family to lay claim to Laurel's family home, as well as her old friends and neighbours, and the memories and guilt of her mother's death. Recently widowed herself, Laurel has to break free of the past and decide to live for herself. Not a lot happens in terms of plot, but the depth of history and feeling is beautifully described, like Laurel's memory of hearing her parents read aloud to each other: 'She cared for her own books, but she cared more for theirs, which meant their voices. ... She was sent to sleep under a velvety cloak of words, richly patterned and stitched with gold, straight out of a fairy tale, while they went reading on into her dreams'. The autobiographical basis for this neat tale adds heartfelt compassion to a metaphor of grief and memory, and I will definitely be reading more by the author.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    I was incredibly excited to read something by an author who is supposed to be fantastic. Imagine my surprise to discover that the plot was underdeveloped and unrealistic. Welty attempts to expose the raw feelings which people experience when they lose a loved one, but every time she began to expound upon this, she veered away. Far too understated in my opinion.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    The book hinges on the death of Judge. McKelva, Laurel's father, but it's really about the living - his survivors, Laurel and his second wife, Fay. Becky, Laurel's mother and dead for 10 years or more also plays a role. To me, the struggle is between the past and present - living, sensuality, pleasure vs. honoring the dead. Fay is totally out of the social milieu of the McKelva's - she is emotional, sensual and in the eyes of polite Mississippi society, crude. But, it seems that Judge McKelva loved her - they acted like newlyweds and he embrace her vitality much to the chagrin of his daughter and neighbors. She didn't really care whether or not they accepted her. His death immediately followed Fay's grabbing him in the hospital - was she trying to shake him into life or death. Laurel is a widow and mourns all those who went before her, her husband, mother and now father. She has not remarried and seems to live a quiet reserved life. Though provoking and well done.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    The Optimist's Daughter is a very quick, but very good book by Eudora Welty. What I like so much about her is that she can say a lot without hitting you over the head with it.It's the story of Laurel McKelva returning to her childhood home for her father Judge McKelva's eye operation and the collision course that results when she has to put up with her self involved, slightly younger than herself stepmother, Fay. This is a great book in the tradition of other Southern novels, without a great deal of character development.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I listened to this in the car and Miss Welty, reading her own work, was a wonderful travelling companion. I felt like she was sitting right beside me telling me the goings-on in Mount Salus with her wonderful Lou Holtz-like lisp and clicking teeth. I was always ready to say, "And then what happened?" However, this book goes far beyond the telling of a good story. I see in it the struggle between the common and the elite, the suffocating closeness of small town life, and the stranglehold that grief can have. While at times I did feel that it drew a bit too much on Southern stereotypes, the rich dialoge is so enhanced by Miss Welty's descriptions, giving wonderful support to each scene. There were times when I just said, "Wow - what a great phrase" or simply found myself rewinding sections just to luxuriate in her reading. I will be adding a paper copy of this to my library just so I can thumb through it from time to time and visit with a good friend. A very special read.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This is a very straightforward book. When Laurel's father dies, she must deal not only with her own grief but that of her friends and neighbors (her father was a well-loved judge in their small town). On top of that, she also has to deal with the histrionics of her stepmother, a woman younger than herself, who does not react in a way that Laurel finds seemly.The night after the funeral, Laurel finds herself alone in her childhood home. Going through things from her past, she reminisces about her parents, and is able to come to terms with aspects of their relationship and her mother's final illness.Welty writes her scenes sparingly, allowing characters to speak for themselves. The disparity between the actions of Laurel's stepmother's family and those of the locals is told through dialogue, rather than description, to great effect. One can't help but cringe on Laurel's behalf for what she has to go through before she is free to mourn her father.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    It is easy to see why The Optimist's Daughter occupies such high standing in the canon of Southern fiction. With sparse and at times beautiful prose, Eudora Welty manages to commuicate much in a very slim volume. However, this economical style of storytelling reduces some of the characters - particularly the unbearably shrill Fay - to a cartoonish level. A good but not great American novel.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This is a very tightly written story (almost a novella) about a daughter's coping with the death of her father. The plot involves an obnoxious second wife. There is plent of good dialog and evocative writing about the South.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    The Optimist's Daughter won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973, and is a short but stunning work. Set primarily in Mississippi, it's the story of Laurel McKelva Hand, currently living in Chicago, visiting the South where her father is failing. Judge McKelva was a pillar of his community. After the death of his first wife (Laurel's mother), he remarried a woman younger than Laurel herself. Welty, through small but significant descriptions of second wife Fay, makes the reader despise her in the first few pages. She is introduced on page 1 when Fay, Laurel, and the Judge are meeting with a doctor about the Judge's condition: "Fay, small and pale in her dress with the gold buttons, was tapping her sandaled foot." And two pages later, as the Judge is describing his medical problem: "Fay laughed -- a single, high note, as derisive as a jay's." Laurel and Fay are forced together as the Judge's condition deteriorates, and he subsequently passes away. Fay is tremendously put out by his death, since it happens on her birthday. After the funeral she leaves town to be with her family. Laurel remains to sort through some of her father's effects and, since Fay has inherited the house, to remove memories of her mother, which she knows Fay will not respect. Welty's writing is beautiful throughout, evoking a strong "sense of place". Here are just a few examples: "The ancient porter was already rolling his iron-wheeled wagon to meet the baggage car, before the train halted. All six of Laurel's bridesmaids, as they still called themselves, were waiting on the station platform." "The procession passed between ironwork gates whose kneeling angles and looping vines shone black as licorice." "The gooseneck lamp threw its dimmed beam on the secretary's warm brown doors. It had been made of the cherry trees on the McKelva place a long time ago; on the lid, the numerals 1817 had been set into a not quite perfect oval of different wood, something smooth and yellow as a scrap of satin." I was fully immersed in this book; wrapped in a blanket of beautiful prose. I will likely read more of Welty's work.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    My first Eudora Welty novel Interesting but not comfortable. In this novel, she seems to imply constantly, meaning one has to work to understand. I've worked to understand plenty in other books (I love Faulkner, and yes, have finished Ulysses.) But here I work and still am unsettled. Also, not exactly a pleasant story! Some good characterizations and character contrasts.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    "Memory lived not in initial possession but in the freed hands, pardoned and freed, and in the heart that can empty but fill again, in the patterns restored by dreams."With her typical economy, Welty weaves the complex story of a woman's coming to terms with the deaths of her husband, mother, and father and the secrets of her family's past. I first encountered this poignant character study as an undergrad and missed so much of its beauty and subtlety. Reading it a second time has truly made me homesick.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I found the book to be difficult to engage in and don't remember much about it but it is rather bleak.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I had trouble getting in to this, then I discovered an audiobook version read by Welty herself and that fixed it. She just makes it all come alive. Mostly a character study (and also a study of a family and the community it's a part of) in the sixties in the south after a small family tragedy. Good stuff, and sparked lots of interesting conversation at book club, which is made up of women from the south, the north, the midwest, and the west (and all living in southwest Viriginia now) and all varying ages.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A one-sitting read with perfect characterizations and a twist on Faulkner's "The past is never dead..." Welty says the past is "impervious, and can never be awakened" but that memory "can be hurt, time and again". Somehow, I think they are both right. But I would have taken the bread board.Reviewed in 2007
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I can appreciate Welty's writing, but this book just didn't capture my attention. It's a slim novel (under 200 pages) and won the Pullitzer prize for fiction in 1972. Not much happens, but then, I suppose that is the point. When you can sum up a person by stating "I know his whole family," what else is there?
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Funny, sad, true. Welty's characters speak like real people and she shows us life. And how death is dealt with by the living.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Pleasant enough, but perhaps a little dated. I enjoyed it, but had an "Is that all there is" feeling at the end.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Members of Book Club liked it much better than I did. The story of a man in Mississippi dying. His career daughter, Laurel, comes to be with him and his second wife, Faye, a woman much different and younger than Laurel's mother. The first part of the book is the Judge's time in the hospital. Faye is almost cruel and unfeeling and Laurel doesn't seem to react much to her actions. The second part of the book is the funeral and aftermath. This part is somewhat more interesting as Faye's family comes for the funeral. The family is definitely not of the social class of the Judge or Laurel's "bridesmaids" (her long time friends) who gather around her providing support. This is my first Eudora Welty book and frankly, I was disappointed. There is a lot of "philosophizing" which sometimes is just hard to figure out. Wanted to like it much better than I did.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A short, sad, perfectly crafted little book about the inevitable passage of all things. Laurel McKelva goes back to the South to take care of her father, who's due to have an operation. His unexpected death gives her a chance to do some hard thinking about how the tragedies in her own family history have made her into the person she is. Like much of Southern literature, the real action in this book seems to have happened sometime in the past, and the characters we meet spend much of their time coming to terms with it. This sort of thing can easily dissolve into sentimental reverie, but Welty, to her credit, seems determined to avoid that trap. For some of her characters, particularly Laurel, who has made a separate life for herself in Chicago, the past refuses to lie still and continually unsettles the minds of those who are left to deal with it. At times a jarringly unsentimental character, her memories of her parents amount to puzzle pieces that refuse to fit the picture supplied by others, and it's wonderful to see Welty's characters negotiate these incongruities. The emotional toll of various kinds of losses suffuses the book, and Welty seems to be an expert on how disappointment and unexpected disasters affect people in the long term. Her description of the McKelva's tense and often dysfunctional family dynamics is both extremely perceptive and absolutely heartbreaking. What the reader is left with is a portrait of a changing town, in which Old South manners and social arrangements are swiftly giving way to a more modern, more standardized way of American life. Many readers may detect a strong hint of classism here, and while many of the characters we meet in Mt. Salus seem comic, the author does seem to argue that something valuable is being lost with the passing of their way of life. Welty's description of Laurel's stepmother, a Texan from an undistinguished family who has no regard for either the past or for book learning, is both harsh and funny, but I expect that many Americans may recognize something about her, too. I beleive that the author's principal concern is a bit more personal: she's interested in exploring how people try to reconstitute themselves after their personal coordinates inevitably begin to fade away. From this perspective, Laurel McKelva seems like a survivor. "The Optimist's Daugher," which clocks in at less than two hundred pages, is a very dense and multifaceted little book: the author somehow succeeds in addressing both personal tragedy and sweeping social change in a pocket-size work. It's hardly an easy read, but I expect that I'll be revisiting it.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    You can see why Ms. Welty is an institution when you read this book. There are so many great quotes, examples of completely true but uniquely conceived observations of life. I'd come back to this book as an example of how to freshen up my own writing. That said, the novel is very inward focused, tracing the journey of a specific woman's grief, of a specific time and place in the American South, that some may find it too slow or quiet to suit their tastes.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I just finished reading Welty's Optimist Daughter for the 2010 Eudora Welty Writers' Symposium. Welty never ceases to amaze with her dark and subtle look into Southern culture. The main character Laurel faces dilemmas and competing loyalties after the death of her father, as she reflects on the deaths of her mother and husband before him. Each shows her a different perspective on life, from which she must choose. Both parents have had vision problems (cataracts) and eye surgery, prior to, though not necessarily causing, their deaths. Laurel's husband's name was Hand, and the no-account handyman who is unable to chase the dirty chimney swift out of the house is named Cheek, though the maid, Missouri, is more successful. There is much dark comedy surrounding the funeral and Laurel's father's second wife Faye, who believes she represents the future and has cut all ties with her past (the family from Texas who shows up to the funeral). In the end, though, the novel is a meditation on modern life and life in the South.