![]() ![]() It slowly becomes clear that Oliphant's odd behaviour and demeanour is a coping mechanism. ![]() ![]() Her ordered, matter-of-fact tone is so strange – it makes the reader also feel that there must be something wrong with her.Īnd then there is this crushing line about Oliphant’s conversations with a pot plant in her flat, where she lives alone: “When the silence and aloneness press down and around me, crushing me, carving me like ice, I need to speak aloud sometimes, if only for proof of life.”Įleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine is absolutely brilliant at depicting and describing loneliness. She is a socially awkward, slightly dowdy character who is the subject of unkind gossip. We meet Oliphant, 30, in her office, describing her prosaic working week and her lunch of supermarket-meal-deal sandwiches, which she eats alone. She will make you laugh, cry, recoil in embarrassment and reassess your own relationships – sometimes all within the same paragraph. I reread the ending of Gail Honeyman’s wonderful debut several times, just to spend a few more minutes in the upsetting, yet uplifting orbit of Eleanor Oliphant. Sometimes, a novel introduces a character so believable, so moving and so original that there is a feeling of real loss when you turn the final page. ![]()
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