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Housekeeping ,c1980, Marilynne RobinsonHousekeeping is a novel by Marilynne Robinson, published in 1980. Ruthie narrates the story of how she and her younger sister Lucille are raised by a succession of relatives in the fictional town of Fingerbone, Idaho. Eventually their aunt Sylvie (who has been living as a transient) comes to take care of them. At first the three are a close knit group, but as Lucille grows up she comes to dislike their eccentric lifestyle and moves out. When Ruthie's well-...
Marilynne Robinson's first novel Housekeeping were it a piece of music, would ressemble Sibelius' Violin Sonata in D Minor - slow and foreboding, full of winter's solitude and loneliness. The setting, Fingerbone (most likely in Idaho) is quite reminiscent of Finland actually. There is the small town surrounded by snow-covered mountains with a huge lake not far from which live Ruthie, the narrator and her sister Lucille. They have been surrounded by death and loss: their grandfather died during a...
Full of loneliness but laced with quiet wit, Housekeeping meditates on the ways grief, sorrow, and depression are transmitted across generations. Set in a decrepit town near a glacial lake in the Far West, the coming-of-age novel follows preteen sisters Ruth and Lucille as they’re raised by their aunt Sylvie, a former vagrant who compulsively hoards, in the wake of the suicide of their mother Helen, whose own father met an untimely end decades earlier in a train accident. The story’s told from t...
I have been thinking about this book since I finished reading it and still am unsure what to say. I believe it has some of the finest prose I've read....causing me frequently to stop, go back, read again once, twice, or more, before I continued with the story. There are parts that are woefully sad, in fact the story is one of total sadness and trying to eke out a life through the melancholy. But these women somehow seem to transcend (or outrun?) the melancholy in their own way. Grandmother by be...
"Perhaps all unsheltered people are angry in their hearts, and would like to break the roof, spine, and ribs, and smash the windows and flood the floor and spindle the curtains and bloat the couch." (237)Floods. Moments of homecoming. Departures. Then Boredom. Languid Days. School Days. Insufferable cold. & stasis.Like some passably modern take on "Little Women", it's filled to the brim with detailed reminiscences, though set in Washington State. Like a Jane Champion film; like some beloved 90s
If Gilead is a story about redemption by water, then Housekeeping is its earlier counterpart, a contrasting story of death by drowning.Housekeeping was Marilynne Robinson's debut novel, published in 1980, and, either Ms. Robinson was in a darker place as she wrote it, or her inquisitive mind felt the need to process death.Death is everywhere here. So is water. Dark water, flooding the locals of the small, sparsely populated town of Fingerbone (presumably somewhere in Washington state, here in th...
"Every memory is turned over and over again, every word, however chance, written in the heart in the hope that memory will fulfill itself, and become flesh, and that the wanderers will find a way home, and the perished, whose lack we always feel, will step through the door finally and stroke our hair with dreaming habitual fondness not having meant to keep us waiting long."Wow. I knew of this book in 1980 when it came out, and in that year I must have picked it up in Shuler's Bookstore In Grand
I finished this book last week and have been traveling through its landscape ever since, much like Sylvie rode her railcars from town to town. Marilynne Robinson creates characters that beg you to live with them, to dig deep and touch their souls. They are unlike any people you have ever known, and yet they are every person you have ever met. They struggle with how to connect to one another and how to suffer the loneliness of the connections they cannot make. The worlds that are most real are th...
I'm getting better at abandoning books which don't give me much back. I bought this by mistake. I meant to buy Home, part of the Gilead trilogy. This is her first novel and for me has all the shortcomings of a first novel. It read like a short story fattened up with minutiae. There's little narrative drive; it has no muscle in its thighs. It floats gently along like some gossamer thing caught on the wind. It isn't bad but I found nothing compelling or distinctive about it. Having said that, some...