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obscuredbyclouds's review against another edition
2.0
Tillie Olsen sounds like a fascinating person and I found the non-fiction essays really interesting. Sadly, the short stories mostly went over my head and made me feel quite stupid.
kjboldon's review against another edition
4.75
Some of these pieces are nearly 100 years old and yet so timely, so beautifully, painfully written. Olsen was writing about intersectional challenges of race and poverty and sexism before we even had words for these.
Edited to add in 2023. When I read this last year, I stopped when I got to Requa 1. There was some burning reason I needed to read Tell Me a Riddle so when I finished that story and tried to enter Requa 1, I got bounced right out by its challenges.
This year, as I'm having a run at the <200ers on my shelves, I remembered I hadn't finished this short book. I dove into Requa 1, somehow expecting something fantastical and LeGuin-ish, not realizing that the one was merely a signal that it was to be the first part of 3. 2 was lost, 3 never written. Yet it's the harshest realism set in the 30s California. It's written in provocative and experimental prose that play with POV and stream of consciousness and line breaks and punctuation. Stevie of Requa 1 could very well be the singled-out child in LeGuin's The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas. This is followed by a few nonfiction pieces to round out the book.
Once again I wonder: what might the world have received, if Tillie Olsen (and so many others) had gotten support with childcare, as a mother and a parent? The questions she raised in Silences continue to echo, decades later.
Edited to add in 2023. When I read this last year, I stopped when I got to Requa 1. There was some burning reason I needed to read Tell Me a Riddle so when I finished that story and tried to enter Requa 1, I got bounced right out by its challenges.
This year, as I'm having a run at the <200ers on my shelves, I remembered I hadn't finished this short book. I dove into Requa 1, somehow expecting something fantastical and LeGuin-ish, not realizing that the one was merely a signal that it was to be the first part of 3. 2 was lost, 3 never written. Yet it's the harshest realism set in the 30s California. It's written in provocative and experimental prose that play with POV and stream of consciousness and line breaks and punctuation. Stevie of Requa 1 could very well be the singled-out child in LeGuin's The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas. This is followed by a few nonfiction pieces to round out the book.
Once again I wonder: what might the world have received, if Tillie Olsen (and so many others) had gotten support with childcare, as a mother and a parent? The questions she raised in Silences continue to echo, decades later.
jenna0010's review against another edition
5.0
This is everything I want in a book. Depression-era labour struggles. Motherhood. Hunger. Tillie Olsen is the top girl of the crop in my books.
mpho3's review against another edition
4.0
"I Stand Here Ironing" is probably the short story for which Olsen is most well known, and it is outstanding. Given her dense, complex style, it's also more accessible than some of her other stories. If you're willing to immerse yourself in her stream-of-consciousness rhythms, “O Yes,” “Tell Me a Riddle,” and “Requa I,” are devastating and powerful. Unabashedly feminist and political, these stories tackle working class concerns in a way that is revelatory. I think this particular collection is lesser known than Tell Me a Riddle, but it's worth seeking out for the poem “I Want You Women Up North to Know" and an essay entitled “A Vision of Hope and Fear," which stunned me:
This is Tillie Olsen writing in 1994. Nearly 30 years later, the ugliness and the beauty, o yes. This gives me hope that we may just survive this.
"Sometimes the young--discouraged, overwhelmed--ask me incredulously: 'You mean you still have hope?' And I hear myself saying, yes. I still have hope: beleaguered, starved, battered, based hope. Through horrors, blood, betrayals, apathy, callousness, retreats, defeats--in every decade of my now 82-year-old life that hope has been tested, affirmed. And more than hope: an exhaustless store of certainty, vision, belief--which came to me first in the time of my youthhood, the Depression '30s.
I still live with the ugliness of the decade: the degrading misery, the aloneness, the ravishing hunger, despair: the violence of the clubbings, gassings, jailings, the then shocking killing of swelling numbers of countryfolk. I live, too, with the beauty of the decade: its affirmation of democracy and action; the new right given to assemble, petition, speak out; the use of the right to vote in unprecedented numbers (the first great attempt in the South to break the terror which kept black citizens from that right); the still unseen evidence of human greatness in words, spirit, and deed; the burgeoning solidarity in the nation, bridging differences in color, background, creed, walk of life. Out of that visibility, that sense of identification, came our first body of literature, art, songs, photographs, film concerned with the lives and experiences of most of us.
For the first time, we began to have a sense of our country in all its hues, its wrongs and its rights, its unique diversity and likenesses, its pain, beauty, strengths, possibilities. We were no longer a country of individual helplessness and isolation. Millions in motion, acting together, might not always change their economic circumstances, but they could electrify the consciousness of the nation.
This is Tillie Olsen writing in 1994. Nearly 30 years later, the ugliness and the beauty, o yes. This gives me hope that we may just survive this.
nehaperi's review against another edition
not reviewing because this was for a class. i'm taking a class on 20th century literature and my professor chose to structure it around the great depression, hence...this.
prior to this collection, the only work i'd read by tillie olsen was "i stand here ironing", in my ap lit class, in high school. i remember liking it, but i definitely don't remember being this emotionally touched by how raw olsen's writing is. i mean, i guess that's a given, considering the circumstances she was writing in and the state of the country around her.
"a vision of fear and hope" and "the strike" were just so painfully honest. i love the inclusion of work from during and after the depression, specifically NOT in chronological order. the ups and downs, from the despair to the wisdom of hope, created a narrative on the great depression that felt, in the best sense of the word, holistic.
i say that because we got everything. the fear, anger, and confusion of the 20s and 30s, "i am on a battlefield, and the increasing stench and smoke sting the eyes so it is impossible to turn them back into the past", juxtaposed with "[the 1930s were] a time of human flowering, when the country was transformed by the hopes, dreams, actions of numerous, nameless human beings, hungry for more than food". the duality in reaction comes from perspective, from mediation, from introspection as a lens through which the impossible simply became a victory. a victory of survival.
prior to this collection, the only work i'd read by tillie olsen was "i stand here ironing", in my ap lit class, in high school. i remember liking it, but i definitely don't remember being this emotionally touched by how raw olsen's writing is. i mean, i guess that's a given, considering the circumstances she was writing in and the state of the country around her.
"a vision of fear and hope" and "the strike" were just so painfully honest. i love the inclusion of work from during and after the depression, specifically NOT in chronological order. the ups and downs, from the despair to the wisdom of hope, created a narrative on the great depression that felt, in the best sense of the word, holistic.
i say that because we got everything. the fear, anger, and confusion of the 20s and 30s, "i am on a battlefield, and the increasing stench and smoke sting the eyes so it is impossible to turn them back into the past", juxtaposed with "[the 1930s were] a time of human flowering, when the country was transformed by the hopes, dreams, actions of numerous, nameless human beings, hungry for more than food". the duality in reaction comes from perspective, from mediation, from introspection as a lens through which the impossible simply became a victory. a victory of survival.
nehaperi's review
not reviewing because this was for a class. i'm taking a class on 20th century literature and my professor chose to structure it around the great depression, hence...this.
prior to this collection, the only work i'd read by tillie olsen was "i stand here ironing", in my ap lit class, in high school. i remember liking it, but i definitely don't remember being this emotionally touched by how raw olsen's writing is. i mean, i guess that's a given, considering the circumstances she was writing in and the state of the country around her.
"a vision of fear and hope" and "the strike" were just so painfully honest. i love the inclusion of work from during and after the depression, specifically NOT in chronological order. the ups and downs, from the despair to the wisdom of hope, created a narrative on the great depression that felt, in the best sense of the word, holistic.
i say that because we got everything. the fear, anger, and confusion of the 20s and 30s, "i am on a battlefield, and the increasing stench and smoke sting the eyes so it is impossible to turn them back into the past", juxtaposed with "[the 1930s were] a time of human flowering, when the country was transformed by the hopes, dreams, actions of numerous, nameless human beings, hungry for more than food". the duality in reaction comes from perspective, from mediation, from introspection as a lens through which the impossible simply became a victory. a victory of survival.
prior to this collection, the only work i'd read by tillie olsen was "i stand here ironing", in my ap lit class, in high school. i remember liking it, but i definitely don't remember being this emotionally touched by how raw olsen's writing is. i mean, i guess that's a given, considering the circumstances she was writing in and the state of the country around her.
"a vision of fear and hope" and "the strike" were just so painfully honest. i love the inclusion of work from during and after the depression, specifically NOT in chronological order. the ups and downs, from the despair to the wisdom of hope, created a narrative on the great depression that felt, in the best sense of the word, holistic.
i say that because we got everything. the fear, anger, and confusion of the 20s and 30s, "i am on a battlefield, and the increasing stench and smoke sting the eyes so it is impossible to turn them back into the past", juxtaposed with "[the 1930s were] a time of human flowering, when the country was transformed by the hopes, dreams, actions of numerous, nameless human beings, hungry for more than food". the duality in reaction comes from perspective, from mediation, from introspection as a lens through which the impossible simply became a victory. a victory of survival.
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