Housekeeping

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Average customer rating 4.4 (10 comments)

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Marilynne Robinson's debut novel, which the NYT called one of the best novels of the past 3 decades. I prefer her second, the Pulitzer prize winning "Gilead." This reminded me a bit of Willa Cather's books, especially "O Pioneers" and "My Antonia."

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A captivating, elegaic novel about family and transcience and what it means to be at home, filled with startlingly exact and illuminating moments of prose. I wore my pen out underlining sentences.

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Oh, oh, oh. I just finished this book--it's short but potent with some of the most gorgeous prose I've read in a long time.

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Unique and unforgettable, I find myself returning to this wonderful novel often. Such luminous prose that I gave up on my highlighter after only a few pages. Reward yourself by reading of this book!

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Oh, Marilynne Robinson. I cannot read your books; I can only eat them. I cannot imagine your characters; I must become them. My world has housekeeping; your world has housekeeping with color, taste, brooms and dust, and the haunting effects of wonderment and poetry. Your book changed me. It took me into someone else, and then allowed me back. I started it over and over and over; finishing it was a grief. But I am blessed with no memory to speak of, so I'll meet it again in awhile.

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Excellent book.

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Which predominates: overwritten tedium or brilliance? (3.5 *s) This is a book that is flooded with descriptions, imagery, and contemplation that can, from sentence to sentence, seem odd, difficult, and overwritten and then insightful, lyrical, and poetic. The central character is Sylvie, a thirty-something female, who has returned to Fingerbone, an obscure western town set on a large lake, to care for her two nieces who have lost both their grandmother and mother. The story is told from the standpoint of Ruthie, one of the girls. A heavy cloud hands over the entire book as death, impermanence, the power of water and the wind, cold weather, forests, mud, deprivation, and the like are constants in this rather gloomy story. It is a formidable environment that Sylvie and Ruthie, largely unsuccessfully, attempt to navigate, including social expectations and illusions. Despite an unspecified life of trouble, there is a strength and resoluteness to Sylvie that resonates. The plot is minimal. The characters serve as a means for the author to develop her themes. The book is difficult and tedious with digressions interlaced throughout, not to mention getting past the author’s obscure word choices, yet there is brilliance on most every page.

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Marilynne Robinson's "Housekeeping" should be savored like fine wine- drink it in slowly to appreciate the nuances. Like all other prose-poetry, it not just about the story, it is also about the language that tells the story. This fine little book is filled with rich images and bone-achingly sad lives that are filled with possibilities.

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Through the coming-of-age reflections of the narrator, Ruthie, Marilynne Robinson explores the idea that family never dies. Instead of the usual skeletons in the closet, however, Ruthie’s dead family members are more like ghosts that not only haunt the nearby lake, but also leave bits of their memory and even themselves in living relatives. While Robinson’s main characters are “outsiders” and “transients,” she constructs their motives and personalities so well that one cannot help but understand that their choices are fated as surely as the blood that runs through their veins. A reviewer called Housekeeping a “modern-day classic” and I have to agree in that wading through her long, complicated sentences was reminiscent of high school required reading. But I hasten to add that this is not a bad thing. As with the reading of most classics, the occasionally necessary re-reading of paragraphs and the slower pace of processing needed to fully ingest the author’s craft was, unequivocally, worth it.

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A great story and great characters. I found the prose to be a bit lengthy to comprehend but over all, a good read.