Laurel returns to her small Mississippi town from Chicago in time for her father to die after eye surgery. Her own husband died in the war a year earlier. Her mother has been dead for years after going blind.

Her father's clueless and stupidly cruel second wife, Fay, is Laurel's age. While Laurel embraces the past, her family's past, Fay shuns it. "The past isn't a thing to me. I belong to the future, didn't you know that?" The future doesn't look good to Laurel. She returns to Chicago after burning her mother's letters, her past life gone. ( )

Laurel McKelva es una mujer de mediana edad que viaja a Nueva Orleans para hacerse cargo de su padre, un juez retirado que ha de someterse a una operación quirúrgica. El juez no logra recuperarse, y muere lentamente. Será entonces cuando Laurel emprenda un largo viaje de regreso a su hogar familiar en Mount Salus, Mississippi, llevando consigo el cuerpo de su padre, y siempre vigilada por la segunda esposa de éste, Fay, una mujer orgullosa y más joven que Laurel. En la enorme casa, rodeada de sus antiguos conocidos y de las paredes que la vieron crecer, Laurel ha de enfrentarse a los fantasmas de su juventud y a las deudas del pasado.

This won the 1973 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. I'm guessing I would not have loved this as much if I had read it in print. Eudora Welty reading it herself with all of the proper cadences and inflections made the story come to life for me. It's a character study in grief that is anchored in the Deep South and resonates with what it is to be human. ( )

This novella has a much heavier, darker mood than I have become accustomed to from Welty. There is little that could be mistaken for humor, and I felt a total abhorrence for the character, Fay, which is also a departure from what I have come to expect from Welty. Her characters are generally likable at some level.

Of course, the subject matter, death and its aftermath, is so serious and Welty addresses it head on. I felt so sad for Laurel and the complete loss she experiences. Even in light of all the kind people who care for her in the town, she has suffered a loss that cannot be lightly comforted.

Perhaps, having lost my own parents, I felt this at a visceral level. I am grateful, and have always been, that I was not an only child, that my loss was shared completely and wholly by others and that my memories were still shared in a way that no outsider could ever have known.

She is a remarkable writer. There is a reason she received the Pulitzer, although this would not be my choice for her best work. ( )

This is a beautifully written quiet little book. The descriptions especially are very evocative, and certainly I know these people, having grown up in the South myself. I'm not sure how much I connected to the story or these characters, though--I felt, as I read, like a disinterested observer, admiring the craft but not getting emotionally involved. Perhaps it is because I feel like I have read the Southern novel so many times over that it has become too shopworn for me by now, which is probably more a fault of mine than of this author's. ( )