‘Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine’ by Gail Honeyman #TuesdayBookBlog #BookReview

Waterstones.co.uk   Amazon.co.uk

Eleanor Oliphant has learned how to survive – but not how to live

Eleanor Oliphant leads a simple life. She wears the same clothes to work every day, eats the same meal deal for lunch every day and buys the same two bottles of vodka to drink every weekend.

Eleanor Oliphant is happy. Nothing is missing from her carefully timetabled life. Except, sometimes, everything.

One simple act of kindness is about to shatter the walls Eleanor has built around herself. Now she must learn how to navigate the world that everyone else seems to take for granted – while searching for the courage to face the dark corners she’s avoided all her life.

Change can be good. Change can be bad. But surely any change is better than… fine?

There’s a lot of hype around this novel, and, for a change, it’s completely justified.

Eleanor is such a complex character. She is difficult, with odd little opinions and ideas and no idea at all how to navigate the modern world. But it’s these ‘quirks’ that we come to love as we get to know her better and to understand her and her past.

This is a novel about loneliness, how we can be so caught up in our own lives and our own needs and wants and problems that we can ignore the sheer misery going on around us. It’s also about how being kind, being human, being nice, can make such a difference. And it’s not preachy at all, it just is.

The writing is skilful, it flows so well and is, like Eleanor, straightforward. But that doesn’t mean that it isn’t beautiful – again, a bit like Eleanor. There are places where the sheer emotion conveyed brings you up short, for example:

‘I took one of my hands in the other, tried to imagine what it would feel like if it was another person’s hand holding mine. There have been times when I felt I might die of loneliness. People sometimes say they might die of boredom, that they’re dying for a cup of tea, but for me, dying of loneliness is not hyperbole. When I feel like that, my head drops and my shoulders slump and I ache, I physically ache, for human contact – ‘

This isn’t a depressing book, however. Rather, it feels very life-affirming. Eleanor is strong, stronger than she knows, and Raymond is a beautiful portrayal of how the most innocuous person, the type of person we all know and probably overlook, can be someone else’s lifeline, and it’s also about how the smallest gestures, how a little bit of concern and thoughtfulness, can make a huge difference. We all need to be kinder.

Eleanor will stay with me for a long time.

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