---
product_id: 9715155
title: "Benediction (Vintage Contemporaries)"
brand: "kent haruf"
price: "C$2192"
currency: NIO
in_stock: true
reviews_count: 7
url: https://www.desertcart.ni/products/9715155-benediction-vintage-contemporaries
store_origin: NI
region: Nicaragua
---

# Benediction (Vintage Contemporaries)

**Brand:** kent haruf
**Price:** C$2192
**Availability:** ✅ In Stock

## Quick Answers

- **What is this?** Benediction (Vintage Contemporaries) by kent haruf
- **How much does it cost?** C$2192 with free shipping
- **Is it available?** Yes, in stock and ready to ship
- **Where can I buy it?** [www.desertcart.ni](https://www.desertcart.ni/products/9715155-benediction-vintage-contemporaries)

## Best For

- kent haruf enthusiasts

## Why This Product

- Trusted kent haruf brand quality
- Free international shipping included
- Worldwide delivery with tracking
- 15-day hassle-free returns

## Description

Benediction (Vintage Contemporaries)

## Images

![Benediction (Vintage Contemporaries) - Image 1](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41Yd+RBncNL.jpg)

## Customer Reviews

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 







  
  
    A beautiful way to take stock
  

*by L***A on Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 17, 2014*

When the big things in life happen, people often take stock and realize what really matters to them -- what people, what events, even what principles. When a big thing happens to a character of a novel, bringing the perfect tone to that taking stock -- and being able to show, rather than tell what really matters -- can make a sad story transcendent.That's what happens in Kent Haruf's Benediction. Dad Lewis has owned and operated the hardware store in a small high plains town for decades. He is now dying of cancer. His wife Mary is overdoing it and ends up in the hospital. She's one tough cookie -- she walks home after the enforced bedrest. But the Lewises are pragmatic and are the kind of people who naturally do the right thing. In this case, it's sending for their daughter, Lorraine, to come home from Denver to help and be with them.As in other Haruf novels, there are other small families and groups of people who enter the orbit of the main characters. Next door, Berta May's young granddaughter has come to live with her after the child's mother dies. Alice is a quiet little girl. Lorraine, who lost a daughter, is drawn to her, as are Alene, a teacher probably ready to retire, and her widowed mother, Willa.Also coming into the Lewis circle is the new preacher in town, fish-out-of-water Lyle, who has an unhappy wife and teenage son. He is a fascinating character -- someone who believes deeply in doing the right thing, but who is unable to communicate that belief or put it into action effectively. He was sent to the Lewises's small town after mucking things up in a bigger church. He's destined to repeat his mistake here.As Dad Lewis grows more ill and loses his strength, the biggest regret of his life is the estrangement of his son. Frank turned out differently from his father, and his father cast him aside in hurt and anger. Although Dad and Mary saw Frank after he left home, it's been years. Lorraine was in contact with him for a bit, but she also has lost touch.The depth of Dad Lewis's failure with his own son contrasts with the way he treated an employee who was stealing from the store. Dad fired him and told the man to leave town with his wife and kids. His wife offered herself to Dad in lieu of paying the money back and he turned her down. Months later, the man kills himself. Dad later found the young widow and kids, and helped them financially until she made a new life.It's the kind of punishment and assistance Dad was never able to give to his own son.The other characters also find ways in which to make up for the people who were taken from them, and for the things they were not able to do in the regular course of family events.There is a quiet strength in Haruf's prose that gives the smallest acts the grandeur of epic movements. One afternoon, Mary and Lorraine grant Dad's wish for a last drive around town. They park in front of the store and watch the normal business going on inside the store. A customer buys something and leaves: ... and then the man swung around and came out through the open doors onto the sidewalk with the paper sack in his hand, coming directly toward them in the car, so near that they could see the buttons on his summer shirt, before he turned and went up the block in the bright sun.  Who was that, Daddy?  I can't think of his name. But I know him. I'll think of it, he said. His voice sounded odd and then suddently he began to weep.Dad then has them drive him out to the country, where the reader learns what happened to the main characters in Haruf's beautiful novel, Plainsong. It resonates even for someone who hasn't read the novel since it first came out in 1999.This quiet strength works to great advantage in a major setpiece in the novel, when Lyle tries to deliver a homily about the Sermon on the Mount, and loving one's enemies. With the war on terrorism in full bloom, his sermon does not go well. Although Lyle's sermon does a wonderful job of explaining how there can be such a thing as a progressive believer in Christ in guiding how an individual can feel about both foreign and domestic policy -- ""And what if we tried it? What if we said to our enemies: We are the most powerful nation on earth. We can destroy you. ... But what if we say, Listen: Instead of any of these, we are going to give willingly and generously to you. We are going to spend the great American national treasure and the will and the human lives that we would have spent on destruction, and instead we are going to turn them all toward creation. We'll mend your roads and highways, expand your schools, modernize your wells, and water supplies, save your ancient artifcats and art and culture, preserve your temples and mosques. In fact, we are going to love you." -- the preacher's speech has a point about the way people act in everyday life as well: And so we know the satisfaction of hate. We know the sweet joy of revenge. How it feels to get even. Oh, that was a nice idea Jesus had. That was a pretty notion, but you can't love people who do evil. It's neither sensible nor practical. It's not wise to the world to love people who do such terrible wrong. ... what if Jesus wasn't kidding? ... What if he meant every word of what he said? What would the world come to?In Haruf's novel, time and unsought opportunities provide the chance to many of the characters perhaps not love their enemies, but to do good despite the evil or sad things that have been done to them. That characters in small towns living lives, but not of quiet desperation despite setbacks and heartache, would choose to carry on and do kind things for others, is in itself a benediction to the idea of a life well-lived. It is a way to seek goodness rather than evil, to seek the things that matter.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 







  
  
    Novel set in Colorado (“a powerful read”)
  

*by T***N on Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on February 27, 2016*

Holt, Colorado, is a very ordinary little town invented by Haruf for the setting of his three novels Plainsong, Eventide and Benediction. It’s the kind of sleepy, unattractive little place that we have all read about in literature and seen portrayed in endless films; the kind of place, in real life, you just couldn’t wait to get away from. And yet, this is what makes Haruf’s work so exceptional. He has the ability to make the ordinary into something completely extraordinary and creates a fictional place that you just can’t wait to get back to.Benediction tells the story of one long, hot summer in Holt, when Dad Lewis returns from hospital with terminal cancer. He has come home to die which he duly does at the end of the novel. That’s it. That’s the story and yet I don’t think I’ve read anything recently that kept me so avidly turning the pages. Alongside the very sad story of Dad’s decline there are sub-plots which are completely uplifting, for example Dad’s next door neighbour takes in Alice, her orphaned eight-year-old granddaughter, and the rather shell-shocked child gradually grows in confidence as she is befriended by a group of older women.Haruf’s characters are uncompromisingly true to life. These are the folk you might expect to meet in typical small town America – conventional and small-minded with a tough outlook born of poverty and grinding hard work. Even the central character, Dad Lewis, upright citizen though he may be, is not likeable. His uncompromising moral standards have caused him to sack an employee who stole money from him, leading ultimately to the man’s suicide and his wife and children facing a life of desperate poverty. He has also alienated his son because he cannot cope with the fact that his offspring is homosexual. And yet, in all Hanuf’s characters, there are such flashes of courage and compassion that you are left feeling optimistic rather than depressed by the state of mankind. Dad Lewis, in penance for his over-hasty judgement, financially supports his ex-employee’s wife and children for years. The same folk who turn their back on Reverend Lyle for preaching that the United States should “turn the other cheek” instead of going to war in Afghanistan and Iraq, turn out en masse to hunt for a missing child. Hanuf makes you care about his characters, despite their flaws and I, for one, want to go back there to find out how life works out for Alice as she grows up and whether Lorraine does take over the hardware store.Haruf’s style of writing is deceptively simple; he uses no imagery and his characters’ conversation is plain and natural, the ordinariness emphasised by the lack of quotation marks. This simplicity of style serves to make even more memorable certain scenes, such as the women’s baptism-like skinny dipping in the cattle’s stock tank or the terrifying account of the minister’s son attempting to hang himself. These are dramatic scenes, loaded with symbolic significance but it is Hanuf’s accounts of very ordinary events that make his work so powerful. Reverend Lyle goes out wandering the town looking for what he calls “the precious ordinary” in the lives of the townspeople of Holt and, at the end of the novel, the reader is left with a sense of being given an exceptional gift in being allowed access to their unexceptional lives.

### ⭐⭐⭐ 







  
  
    Disappointing end to the "trilogy"
  

*by D***G on Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on September 16, 2020*

After reading the first two books in the Plainsong Trilogy, I was really looking forward to learning how the various characters fared into the future. How disappointed I was to realise that none of the characters in the first two books feature in the third book.  There were a couple of indirect "mentions" of previous characters, but this book focussed on completely new characters, and in particular on the family and friends of Dad Lewis, who is in his last few weeks of life (no spoilers; this is evident from the outset). Knowing that Kent Haruf's other two books are also set in Holt, it is very unclear why Benediction is described as part of the Plainbsong trilogy. So, that is reason #1 that I was disappointed.Reason #2 for disappointment was the quite different writing style and structure. Plainsong (book #1) was broken into chapters, each headed with the name of which character the chapter was focussed on. Eventide (book #2) removed this structure, and moved back and forth more than book #1 between the present and the past. It was therefore a bit more difficult to follow than book #1, but not too difficult. Book #3 was even more unstructured. Each chapter started annoyingly by using pronouns (he/she), so that it was often not until the second paragraph - or even later - that I could figure out which character was being referred to. It also bounced back to the past much more frequently, and not always clearly. As stated above, it also was much more focussed on one group of people.Having said all of this, the book is still worth reading. It was very sad and poignant, especially the last 50 pages, as Dad Lewis slipped closer and closer to oblivion.

---

## Why Shop on Desertcart?

- 🛒 **Trusted by 1.3+ Million Shoppers** — Serving international shoppers since 2016
- 🌍 **Shop Globally** — Access 737+ million products across 21 categories
- 💰 **No Hidden Fees** — All customs, duties, and taxes included in the price
- 🔄 **15-Day Free Returns** — Hassle-free returns (30 days for PRO members)
- 🔒 **Secure Payments** — Trusted payment options with buyer protection
- ⭐ **TrustPilot Rated 4.5/5** — Based on 8,000+ happy customer reviews

**Shop now:** [https://www.desertcart.ni/products/9715155-benediction-vintage-contemporaries](https://www.desertcart.ni/products/9715155-benediction-vintage-contemporaries)

---

*Product available on Desertcart Nicaragua*
*Store origin: NI*
*Last updated: 2026-02-24*