Review: “Eleanor Oliphant is completely fine” by Gail Honeyman.

Title: Eleanor Oliphant is completely fine

Author: Gail Honeyman

Editorial: Viking - Pamela Dorman Books

Year: 2017

Pages: 327 (Hardcover)

ISBN-13: 9780735220683

PVP: 23 € (Hardcover)

Mark: 9/10

ABSTRACT

No one’s ever told Eleanor that life should be better than fine.

Meet Eleanor Oliphant: She struggles with appropriate social skills and tends to say exactly what she’s thinking. Nothing is missing in her carefully timetabled life of avoiding social interactions, where weekends are punctuated by frozen pizza, vodka, and phone chats with Mummy.

But everything changes when Eleanor meets Raymond, the bumbling and deeply unhygienic IT guy from her office. When she and Raymond together save Sammy, an elderly gentleman who has fallen on the sidewalk, the three become the kinds of friends who rescue one another from the lives of isolation they have each been living. And it is Raymond’s big heart that will ultimately help Eleanor find the way to repair her own profoundly damaged one.

Soon to be a major motion picture produced by Reese Witherspoon, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine is the smart, warm, and uplifting story of an out-of-the-ordinary heroine whose deadpan weirdness and unconscious wit make for an irresistible journey as she realizes. . .

The only way to survive is to open your heart.

PERSONAL VALORATION

Justification

I honestly do not know why this book ended up on my “to read” list in the first place. Maybe it was his cover (both the hardcover and the softcover are very interesting), perhaps it was for its synopsis (which deals with topics that interest me such as friendship, loneliness or vodka and pizza) or maybe it was because of all the positive comments I had read about it. A month after marking it in Goodreads as “to read” I had already bought it and I was enjoying the story.

Plot

The story revolves around Eleanor Oliphant, a thirty-something who lives in a constant, lonely and pleasant routine both in her work in a small graphic design company (doing the paperwork) from Monday to Friday, in her phone conversations with her mother on Wednesdays in the afternoon, as in her pizza and vodka sessions on weekends. But she is fine with that. She is perfectly fine. She has been alone now and always and she doesn’t need anything nor anyone else. That's what she says to herself. But, suddenly, everything around her begins to change: how does she get the man of your dreams (a singer from a local band) to fall in love with her?, What implications does it have that she and her company's computer specialist, Raymond, have helped a man on the street? ...

Characters

The undisputed protagonist of this novel is Eleanor Oliphant. Eleanor is a woman who lives according to her routines (dresses the same clothes, eats the same meals, has rituals during the week and during the weekend), is socially awkward (avoids interactions with coworkers and with the rest of humanity) and she is deeply alone (since she was a child she has been in and out of fosters houses) and repressed (she assumes that she does not have or has had any emotional needs). As you can see it is a complex character but in certain aspects we can feel identified with her: her social clumsiness, her mechanisms to deal with internal conflicts…

Throughout the novel appear few other characters (basically because of Eleanor’s little interest in social contacts) like her mother (Eleanor maintains weekly contacts with her and the conversations are anything but pleasant), Raymond (Elanor’s IT coworker and, after helping a man on the street, a fundamental part of her life) or Samuel (the man they helped and who turns to Eleanor and Raymond).

Atmosphere

The book takes place in the current Glasgow and we see it through the eyes of Eleanor. In this way, her previous experiences and (especially) her traumas influence reality and the characters we perceive. Thus, Eleanor gives little importance to the comments and criticisms she receives from her co-workers or from anyone in her environment except in the case of her mother.

Writing style

The writer Gail Honeyman has achieved in this book (her first publication) a perfect mixture between laughter and crying, between action and description and between slowness and speed. I have been lucky enough to read it in the original language (ie, English) and it really is worth it (if only for the transcription of Raymond's Scottish accent). I have been very pleasantly surprised by the entire writing style and I do not find any defect either now or at the time I was reading it. Its distribution in three parts (Good days, Bad days and Better Days) and in chapters is very successful and balanced and allows the book to be read with absolute ease.

GENERAL COMMENT

“Eleanor Oliphant is completely fine" is the debut book by the writer Gail Honeyman. An endearing story about a peculiar woman who lives alone, isolated from the world around her and unable to assimilate part of her own biography. But suddenly, due to life circumstances, she begins to relate to people around her: she wants to make the singer of a local band to fall in love with her and help a man who, along with his co-worker Raymond, saved on the street. It is not a love story, it is not a story of "misfit becomes a popular person", it is a story of acceptance and self-esteem.

-R.