Joe and Ruth Allston are elderly retirees surrounded by friends who are either ill or dead. Joe is somewhat wary of the future. One day, he receives a postcard from an old friend, and then looks through his old diaries from the time when he and Ruth met this friend in Denmark. The story then alternates between the past, when he and Ruth were friends with this woman and her peculiar gothic family and the present, where Joe is waiting to grow old. This novel won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1977, one of the most prestigious literary awards in the United States. It is beautifully written, the words flow with melancholy, yet also with wit. I had not read anything by this author before. It was an incredible discovery.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“I had an immediate semaphore from Ruth, which said, with flapping red flags, DO NOT SAY ANYTHING! DO NOT, REPEAT DO NOT, ASK HER WHO HER HUSBAND IS OR WHAT HE DOES. DO NOT SAY ANYTHING BEYOND ROUTINE POLITENESS. TAKE CARE. BE ALERT. SHUT UP. Joe and Ruth Allston are elderly retirees surrounded by friends who are either ill or dead. Joe is somewhat wary of the future. One day, he receives a postcard from an old friend, and then looks through his old diaries from the time when he and Ruth met this friend in Denmark. The story then […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":20933,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[291,299,294],"tags":[131,19,57],"class_list":["post-20897","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-books-2026","category-challenge-abc-prenoms-2025-2026","category-challenge-solidaire-2026","tag-elderly","tag-love","tag-memories"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/redheadwithabrain.ch\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/hans-mRnnSYw_afA-unsplash-scaled.jpg?fit=1925%2C2560&ssl=1","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/redheadwithabrain.ch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20897","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/redheadwithabrain.ch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/redheadwithabrain.ch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redheadwithabrain.ch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redheadwithabrain.ch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20897"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/redheadwithabrain.ch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20897\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20934,"href":"https:\/\/redheadwithabrain.ch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20897\/revisions\/20934"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redheadwithabrain.ch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20933"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/redheadwithabrain.ch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20897"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redheadwithabrain.ch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20897"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redheadwithabrain.ch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20897"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
She assumes that I have all the acuteness of a mongoloid, and so she stands on tiptoe and wigwags wildly enough to catch the attention of everyone within a half mile, and unless I give her back a signal as obvious as her own, she believes I have not only missed the original situation that set her to signaling but have somehow overlooked the fact that she is now up on the table flapping her arms.
In this case I carefully did not look at her. I smiled at the countess, who was stony, with an angry flush around her eyes, and at Manon, skinny and nervous and maintaining her sweet vague expression. Then I finally did look across at Ruth and widen my eyes slightly so she could relax. With her help, I managed not to say to this Miss Weibull, HOW COME YOU\u2019RE A MISS, BUT EIGHT MONTHS ALONG? OLD DANISH CUSTOM, EH? HA-HA.”<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"