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Housekeeping
A modern classic, Housekeeping is the story of Ruth and her younger sister, Lucille, who grow up haphazardly, first under the care of their competent grandmother, then of two comically bumbling great-aunts, and finally of Sylvie, their eccentric and remote aunt. The family house is in the small Far West town of Fingerbone set on a glacial lake, the same lake where their grandfather died in a spectacular train wreck, and their mother drove off a cliff to her death. It is a town "chastened by an outsized landscape and extravagant weather, and chastened again by an awareness that the whole of human history had occurred elsewhere." Ruth and Lucille's struggle toward adulthood beautifully illuminates the price of loss and survival, and the dangerous and deep undertow of transience.
219 pages, Paperback
First published March 1, 1980
About the author
Marilynne Robinson
45 books5,452 followersAmerican novelist and essayist. Across her writing career, Robinson has received numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2005, National Humanities Medal in 2012, and the 2016 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. In 2016, Robinson was named in Time magazine's list of 100 most influential people. Robinson began teaching at the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1991 and retired in the spring of 2016.
Robinson is best known for her novels Housekeeping (1980) and Gilead (2004). Her novels are noted for their thematic depiction of both rural life and faith. The subjects of her essays have spanned numerous topics, including the relationship between religion and science, US history, nuclear pollution, John Calvin, and contemporary American politics.
Robinson is best known for her novels Housekeeping (1980) and Gilead (2004). Her novels are noted for their thematic depiction of both rural life and faith. The subjects of her essays have spanned numerous topics, including the relationship between religion and science, US history, nuclear pollution, John Calvin, and contemporary American politics.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 7,131 reviews
July 26, 2016
written in exquisite detail, as everyone has noted, but a lot of the rest of what's been written in the more recent reviews i find sort of troubling and, frankly, misleading. recommended for 'women who like descriptive writing'? gross. this novel was given to me by a dude, and further recommended by a (male) writer i know-- a guy who counts earnest hemingway among his favorite writers-- as one of the best novels of the 20th century. this is not, as has been implied, some kind of lady-book.
marilynne robinson's 'housekeeping', like all great literature, is a revelation. it's a revelation of lonliness in particular, and of transience (two subjects often, if stupidly, associated with male psyches and literary tastes). it resonates less, in my opinion, as a girl-comes-of-age story or as a tale of sisterly bonds than it does as just the story of a person trying to make it in a family trying to make it in a town trying to make it in this world. about the survival strategies of each. about how things just keep going, keep trying to make it (or stop trying), and why.
albert camus wrote that "there is but one serious philosophical problem and that is suicide"--the problem of why we should and shouldn't go on living. robinson, of course, is a novelist, not a philosopher, and she's not in the business of telling us why we should or shouldn't go on, but of showing us how (and sometimes why) we do or don't. 'housekeeping' is nothing less than a narrative account of this most profound and universally relevant fact: the fact that we keep going, or that we don't, and how we do or don't (and sometimes why).
***
"there was not a soul there but knew how shallow-rooted the whole town was. it flooded yearly, and had burned once. often enough the lumber mill shut down, or burned down. there were reports that things were otherwise elsewhere, and anyone, on a melancholy evening, might feel that fingerbone was a meager and difficult place.
"so a diaspora threatened always. and there is no living creature, though the whims of eons had put its eyes on boggling stalks and clampled it in a carapace, dimished it to a pinpoint and given it a taste for mud and stuck it down a well or hid it under a stone, but that creature will live on if it can. so fingerbone, which despite all its difficultes sometimes seemed pleasant and ordinary, would value itelf, too, and live on if and as it could. so every wanderer whose presence suggested it might be as well to drift, or it could not matter much, was met with something that seemed at first sight a moral reaction, since morality is a check upon the strongest temptations."
marilynne robinson
'housekeeping'
marilynne robinson's 'housekeeping', like all great literature, is a revelation. it's a revelation of lonliness in particular, and of transience (two subjects often, if stupidly, associated with male psyches and literary tastes). it resonates less, in my opinion, as a girl-comes-of-age story or as a tale of sisterly bonds than it does as just the story of a person trying to make it in a family trying to make it in a town trying to make it in this world. about the survival strategies of each. about how things just keep going, keep trying to make it (or stop trying), and why.
albert camus wrote that "there is but one serious philosophical problem and that is suicide"--the problem of why we should and shouldn't go on living. robinson, of course, is a novelist, not a philosopher, and she's not in the business of telling us why we should or shouldn't go on, but of showing us how (and sometimes why) we do or don't. 'housekeeping' is nothing less than a narrative account of this most profound and universally relevant fact: the fact that we keep going, or that we don't, and how we do or don't (and sometimes why).
***
"there was not a soul there but knew how shallow-rooted the whole town was. it flooded yearly, and had burned once. often enough the lumber mill shut down, or burned down. there were reports that things were otherwise elsewhere, and anyone, on a melancholy evening, might feel that fingerbone was a meager and difficult place.
"so a diaspora threatened always. and there is no living creature, though the whims of eons had put its eyes on boggling stalks and clampled it in a carapace, dimished it to a pinpoint and given it a taste for mud and stuck it down a well or hid it under a stone, but that creature will live on if it can. so fingerbone, which despite all its difficultes sometimes seemed pleasant and ordinary, would value itelf, too, and live on if and as it could. so every wanderer whose presence suggested it might be as well to drift, or it could not matter much, was met with something that seemed at first sight a moral reaction, since morality is a check upon the strongest temptations."
marilynne robinson
'housekeeping'
March 16, 2015
This is Literature with a capital L in the form of a Doric column so high you’ll get a crick in your neck trying to see to the top of it. You really do feel like you are becoming a better person as you read this novel, even as you fight the drowsiness which is baked into each and every sinuous delectable palpable sensuous lapidary paragraph. Huh? What? What was that??
The story, such as it is, and it really isn't, is that two little sisters are orphaned and then looked after by their grandmamma who ups and dies and then they are looked after by elderly great aunts (they were my favourites but alas they didn’t last long – I think they couldn’t wait to get out of this book too) and then by their mother’s sister Sylvie who is like this kind of elegant bag lady drifter who lets the house go to rack and ruin and cares not a fig if the girls go to school.
There is a lot of mooning about in this novel. This is the third novel I read in recent times in which the protagonist is a teenage girl and who kind-of narrates the whole thing – I Capture the Castle and We Have Always Lived In the Castle were the other two. Maybe this one should have been called Castlekeeping. Okay, maybe not.
When you look at movies narrated by teenaged girls they seem to have a lot more zest, and hardly any mooning about. I’m thinking of Badlands, Clueless, Amelie, Freeway, True Grit, Mean Girls, Easy A, etc. Girls with some pep to them. In Housekeeping, sisters Ruthie and Lucille mostly troop about boredly observing small examples of nature, like bees and ripples and each other’s coats. About three quarters the way through, Lucille gets a little hacked off with this teenage novocaine Walden experience and slings her hook. The reader looks longingly after her but knows he must trudge on.
Here is how you can tell this is literature:
Lucille almost ran down the stairs. We heard the slish and moil of her steps in the hall
Yes, the hall is flooded, but slish and moil, hey? Here’s another:
Every spirit passing through the world fingers the tangible and mars the mutable, and finally has come to look and not to buy.
That’s on the same page as slish and moil. Okay, here’s another good one:
She seemed to dislike the disequilibrium of counterpoising a roomful of light against a worldful of darkness.
(Not a world full of darkness, a worldful of darkness. Important difference.)
This actually means that the aunt liked to eat her evening meal in the dark and not switch on the light.
Here’s another one:
Lucille would say I fell asleep, but I did not. I simply let the darkness in the sky become coextensive with the darkness in my skull and bowels and bones. Everything that falls upon the eye is apparition, a sheet dropped over the world’s true workings.
This is some fancy hifalutin chat coming from such a callow youngster. And it never stops. Here she is thinking about her mother and her aunt (thinking about the mother and the aunt accounts for around 88% of Ruthie’s thoughts, with another 12% spent on her sister. She’s the only teenage girl ever who didn’t once think about pop music.) :
They were both long and narrow women like me, and nerves like theirs walk my legs and gesture my hands.
Eventually the profound musings became like a form of transcendental muzak :
Thoughts bear the same relation, in mass and weight, to the darkness they rise from, as reflections do to the water they ride upon, and in the same way they are arbitrary, or merely given.
Did I think this was any good? Well, you know, some people like Albert Ayler, some people like Jeff Koons, some people even profess to like the films of Eric Rohmer. What is Art? Rock Hudson said Art is a boy’s name.
Maybe we could rephrase that question then. Did I like it?
No.
November 1, 2021
Speed Dating with a Book, Kindle 2021 edition – my most successful encounter so far, there was love, if not at first sight, maybe after 50 pages or so.
It’s been too long since I finished the novel to be able to write a proper review. Also, no time. I will only try to make sense in a few words of my reasons for loving this book. It was totally unexpected as the synopsis did not attract me at all. I bought it in 2016, probably because of a deal and it was on my TBR due to its listing in a Yale literature course. I also read a few reviews who were saying the novel was very descriptive (true) and it made me dread reading it even more. Thanks to my project to try to get rid of some of the books that I own, I finally gave it a chance. Oh, wow. The writing, the atmosphere of the book, its ethereality, the strange characters, the wilderness of the places and the people, everything was so beautiful. Marilynne Robinson’s writing is out of this world, descriptive yes, but it did not bore me for one second. It was enchanting and I wanted more.
“Fingerbone was never an impressive town. It was chastened by an outsized landscape and extravagant weather, and chastened again by an awareness that the whole of human history had occurred elsewhere. “The above mentioned town is where the slim novel is set. It is the story of an unconventional family plagued by loss and abandonment. It is the story of Ruth and Lucille who are abandoned by their mother when she plunges by choice in the surrounding lake. The children are raised by a succession of relatives, finally settling with their aunt Sylvie, a former vagrant, who moves back in town. The two girls, who are very different from one another, develop a strange relationship with their aunt, the environment, their home and other people. The deep lake close to the town is an important character in the story. It is both a source of death and renewal.
It’s been too long since I finished the novel to be able to write a proper review. Also, no time. I will only try to make sense in a few words of my reasons for loving this book. It was totally unexpected as the synopsis did not attract me at all. I bought it in 2016, probably because of a deal and it was on my TBR due to its listing in a Yale literature course. I also read a few reviews who were saying the novel was very descriptive (true) and it made me dread reading it even more. Thanks to my project to try to get rid of some of the books that I own, I finally gave it a chance. Oh, wow. The writing, the atmosphere of the book, its ethereality, the strange characters, the wilderness of the places and the people, everything was so beautiful. Marilynne Robinson’s writing is out of this world, descriptive yes, but it did not bore me for one second. It was enchanting and I wanted more.
“Fingerbone was never an impressive town. It was chastened by an outsized landscape and extravagant weather, and chastened again by an awareness that the whole of human history had occurred elsewhere. “The above mentioned town is where the slim novel is set. It is the story of an unconventional family plagued by loss and abandonment. It is the story of Ruth and Lucille who are abandoned by their mother when she plunges by choice in the surrounding lake. The children are raised by a succession of relatives, finally settling with their aunt Sylvie, a former vagrant, who moves back in town. The two girls, who are very different from one another, develop a strange relationship with their aunt, the environment, their home and other people. The deep lake close to the town is an important character in the story. It is both a source of death and renewal.
July 28, 2017
I was craving a book like this...had wanted to read it forever.
I can't express how much I appreciate this book. The story itself had me in the palm of my hands. The writing was so rich and breathtaking- I felt like I was being taken out to an expensive fine-dining experience-- savoring every bite.
No POV alternating chapters - not a long-winded 500 page novel. This powerful novel with many themes: family, loss, death, abandonment, unconventional lifestyles, small towns, with memorable characters - and an ending I never saw coming was only 219 pages!
A PERFECT FLAWLESS NOVEL!!!!
I can't express how much I appreciate this book. The story itself had me in the palm of my hands. The writing was so rich and breathtaking- I felt like I was being taken out to an expensive fine-dining experience-- savoring every bite.
No POV alternating chapters - not a long-winded 500 page novel. This powerful novel with many themes: family, loss, death, abandonment, unconventional lifestyles, small towns, with memorable characters - and an ending I never saw coming was only 219 pages!
A PERFECT FLAWLESS NOVEL!!!!
June 3, 2024
Housekeeping is an iced Starbucks drink: 75% filler 25% good stuff
Astonishingly, the commencement of the book is decent. The setting has an eerie, mystical vibe, and there are a few mysterious elements used to develop backstory.
However, outside of Chapter 1, every time I picked up this book, I was bored within 60 seconds. The long paragraphs, mountains of unnecessary adjectives and adverbs, and the constant repetition of the events from Chapter 1 caused me to suddenly lose interest.
This book is 75% fatuous vapor that should have been distilled down to 50 pages.
The Green Light at the End of the Dock (How much I spent):
Softcover Text – $7.69 from Amazon
Audiobook – Free through Libby
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Astonishingly, the commencement of the book is decent. The setting has an eerie, mystical vibe, and there are a few mysterious elements used to develop backstory.
However, outside of Chapter 1, every time I picked up this book, I was bored within 60 seconds. The long paragraphs, mountains of unnecessary adjectives and adverbs, and the constant repetition of the events from Chapter 1 caused me to suddenly lose interest.
This book is 75% fatuous vapor that should have been distilled down to 50 pages.
The Green Light at the End of the Dock (How much I spent):
Softcover Text – $7.69 from Amazon
Audiobook – Free through Libby
Connect With Me!
Blog Twitter BookTube Facebook Insta
November 3, 2009
I might as well cut to the chase here: this book was a pretty significant and unexpected disappointment for me. Housekeeping falls into one of my favorite literary sub-genres: mostly plotless, character-driven novels (e.g. To the Lighthouse, In Search of Lost Time). I'd seen the Pen/Faulkner Award, the "best of" status among recent American books voted on by “writers, critics, editors and other literary sages” (http://www.nytimes.com/ref/books/fict...), and the high ratings from friends with impeccable taste. But while reading, my emotions were never really aroused, and I feel that Robinson’s flirtations with profundity remain just that, occasionally failing to ring true at all.
My requirements for this sub-genre are few but demanding. I'll go ahead and split them into three groups, although all three bleed together: 1) I need to feel something at some point; 2) the prose should be exceptional in some way, which for me is actually very much tied into #1); 3) my understanding of humanity and myself should be expanded through contact with the characters and their minds.
This book failed me to some degree on each of these points, which is not to say that I think this book isn't good or wouldn't fulfill all of these requirements and more for another reader. Regarding point 1, I felt strangely empty and uninvolved throughout, despite reading this under ideal conditions—long, unbroken stretches. It’s very difficult for me to analyze this lack of response, but I think it’s primarily tied to the prose and the characterization. I should be clear about this: the writing is good, even very good. Perhaps I’ve become spoiled or overly-influenced by Modernist stylists (Woolf!), but the prose is often plain, occasionally beautiful, and sometimes clunky in its strivings for transcendence. In the end, Robinson’s nondescript approach--and this is a very relative claim--didn’t capture my imagination.
Perhaps my greatest disappointment with the book, and this was a BIG surprise, was with the characterization. Robinson gathers everyone into two main groups, the conformists and the nonconformists, with whom we are meant to identify via Ruthie's narration. With the possible exception of Ruthie and Lucille’s grandmother, each character fits neatly into these two types. Can anyone who’s read the book tell me what the difference is, really, between Ruthie, Sylvie, and Helen? They each fall into a very specific outsider-by-nature category: drifters or transients with a strong connection to the past, a weak connection to the present, and a malaise that somehow seems a little too pleasant considering the ever-present specter of suicide. I felt as if I couldn't quite follow this specific idea of non-conformity, that it didn't feel true/real, and that I couldn't really access or understand their lives, their desires, their concerns. We're gently directed to see Lucille as intolerant, as misled in her desire for a normal life and for friends. After stepping outside the fantasy of dreamy living contained within the book, however, I find her desires entirely reasonable and I think her concerns with her living situation are probably more than reasonable.
Now, one aspect of reviewing that's always annoyed me is when people complain about disliking characters or being unable to relate to them as a reason for disliking a book, when often the book is crafted to elicit such responses. Perhaps in the past I’ve been too judgmental in this respect. Or maybe the important thing is simply that the characters cause you to feel some emotion, any at all, and that you can feel these people to be real, multidimensional beings. I didn’t get that from Housekeeping. I couldn’t feel the pain that Ruthie may have been experiencing because I was never sure what she was feeling, no matter how grave the situation. The fallout from bad events and neutral events felt more or less the same; Sylvie and Ruthie’s instincts felt foreign, removed, and with Sylvie in particular, borderline insane: the ‘imaginary kids’ storyline was a particularly forced attempt at profundity that struck me as silly and unrelatable. And my chief annoyance with Robinson is that she seemed bent on pushing me toward one limited character type and away from another when, if I'm forced to live in this dichotomous world she’s created, I'd almost certainly choose the other path—the one of Lucille, the one that would lead me out of Fingerbone to the promise of Boston rather than to greasy diners, truck stops, and train cars. Robinson doesn’t exactly romanticize the latter type of living, but it's still portrayed as the preferable way of leaving a trapped existence.
When I say that I have limited access to these characters and this world, and that it ultimately felt untrue, here’s what I mean (this is Ruthie in the final pages of the book): I have never distinguished readily between thinking and dreaming. I know my life would be much different if I could ever say, This I have learned from my senses, while that I have merely imagined. Really? It’s character revelations and discoveries like this that pepper the book, and for each one that I could say ‘Yes, I get this, I’m with you,’ there were two or three like that quote above where I just couldn’t grasp the experience or couldn’t relate to the introspection. For me, that ring of truthiness was missing.
It’s tempting to view this story broadly and crudely. We see the decay that occurs when one stays in the same place—the same small, sleepy, petty town. Ruthie must, at some point, become active and move on toward something different or face troubling consequences. Yet a similar impetus drives Lucille, the conformist. What are we to make of this? Is the point that different personalities have different paths, and these shouldn't be limited or overly-determined by society? Why is Lucille placed in a negative light when the choice that faces both sisters--whether to stick with family, the past, decay--presents so many difficulties? Perhaps I expected the wrong things from this book, and I would’ve been better off by just letting it float by without over-considering some of these themes and meanings. And yet, awards and reputation aside, Housekeeping often does ‘ask’ to be taken seriously within the text itself. I’m missing something.
My requirements for this sub-genre are few but demanding. I'll go ahead and split them into three groups, although all three bleed together: 1) I need to feel something at some point; 2) the prose should be exceptional in some way, which for me is actually very much tied into #1); 3) my understanding of humanity and myself should be expanded through contact with the characters and their minds.
This book failed me to some degree on each of these points, which is not to say that I think this book isn't good or wouldn't fulfill all of these requirements and more for another reader. Regarding point 1, I felt strangely empty and uninvolved throughout, despite reading this under ideal conditions—long, unbroken stretches. It’s very difficult for me to analyze this lack of response, but I think it’s primarily tied to the prose and the characterization. I should be clear about this: the writing is good, even very good. Perhaps I’ve become spoiled or overly-influenced by Modernist stylists (Woolf!), but the prose is often plain, occasionally beautiful, and sometimes clunky in its strivings for transcendence. In the end, Robinson’s nondescript approach--and this is a very relative claim--didn’t capture my imagination.
Perhaps my greatest disappointment with the book, and this was a BIG surprise, was with the characterization. Robinson gathers everyone into two main groups, the conformists and the nonconformists, with whom we are meant to identify via Ruthie's narration. With the possible exception of Ruthie and Lucille’s grandmother, each character fits neatly into these two types. Can anyone who’s read the book tell me what the difference is, really, between Ruthie, Sylvie, and Helen? They each fall into a very specific outsider-by-nature category: drifters or transients with a strong connection to the past, a weak connection to the present, and a malaise that somehow seems a little too pleasant considering the ever-present specter of suicide. I felt as if I couldn't quite follow this specific idea of non-conformity, that it didn't feel true/real, and that I couldn't really access or understand their lives, their desires, their concerns. We're gently directed to see Lucille as intolerant, as misled in her desire for a normal life and for friends. After stepping outside the fantasy of dreamy living contained within the book, however, I find her desires entirely reasonable and I think her concerns with her living situation are probably more than reasonable.
Now, one aspect of reviewing that's always annoyed me is when people complain about disliking characters or being unable to relate to them as a reason for disliking a book, when often the book is crafted to elicit such responses. Perhaps in the past I’ve been too judgmental in this respect. Or maybe the important thing is simply that the characters cause you to feel some emotion, any at all, and that you can feel these people to be real, multidimensional beings. I didn’t get that from Housekeeping. I couldn’t feel the pain that Ruthie may have been experiencing because I was never sure what she was feeling, no matter how grave the situation. The fallout from bad events and neutral events felt more or less the same; Sylvie and Ruthie’s instincts felt foreign, removed, and with Sylvie in particular, borderline insane: the ‘imaginary kids’ storyline was a particularly forced attempt at profundity that struck me as silly and unrelatable. And my chief annoyance with Robinson is that she seemed bent on pushing me toward one limited character type and away from another when, if I'm forced to live in this dichotomous world she’s created, I'd almost certainly choose the other path—the one of Lucille, the one that would lead me out of Fingerbone to the promise of Boston rather than to greasy diners, truck stops, and train cars. Robinson doesn’t exactly romanticize the latter type of living, but it's still portrayed as the preferable way of leaving a trapped existence.
When I say that I have limited access to these characters and this world, and that it ultimately felt untrue, here’s what I mean (this is Ruthie in the final pages of the book): I have never distinguished readily between thinking and dreaming. I know my life would be much different if I could ever say, This I have learned from my senses, while that I have merely imagined. Really? It’s character revelations and discoveries like this that pepper the book, and for each one that I could say ‘Yes, I get this, I’m with you,’ there were two or three like that quote above where I just couldn’t grasp the experience or couldn’t relate to the introspection. For me, that ring of truthiness was missing.
It’s tempting to view this story broadly and crudely. We see the decay that occurs when one stays in the same place—the same small, sleepy, petty town. Ruthie must, at some point, become active and move on toward something different or face troubling consequences. Yet a similar impetus drives Lucille, the conformist. What are we to make of this? Is the point that different personalities have different paths, and these shouldn't be limited or overly-determined by society? Why is Lucille placed in a negative light when the choice that faces both sisters--whether to stick with family, the past, decay--presents so many difficulties? Perhaps I expected the wrong things from this book, and I would’ve been better off by just letting it float by without over-considering some of these themes and meanings. And yet, awards and reputation aside, Housekeeping often does ‘ask’ to be taken seriously within the text itself. I’m missing something.
February 15, 2020
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 railroad accident on the rail bridge across the lake (representing a way out of the life in Fishbone - death or escape), their mother committed suicide by driving herself in a borrowed car off a cliff into the lake, their father walked off never to be heard from again and neither girl had memories of him, and their grandmother dies clutching at life in her sleep.
The motif of housekeeping is evoked by the pristine state of the awkward house built by the not-so-talented hands of their deceased grandfather while they are cared for by their two aunts Lily and Nona who escape as soon as another aunt Sylvie comes to take care of the girls. From this point on, the house deteriorates: there is a flood which rots away the furniture and books and Sylvie is so dislocated in her own mind that she collects garbage and paper and the girls start skipping school.
The atmosphere in the story is relatively mournful and heavy:
"A narrow pond would form in the orchard, water clear as air covering grass and black leaves and fallen branches, all around it black leaves and drenched grass and fallen branches, and on it an image in an eye, sky clouds, trees, our hovering faced and our cold hands." (p.5)
"Fingerbone was never an impressive town. It was chastened by an outsized landscape and extravagant weather chastened again by an awareness that the whole of human history had occurred elsewhere." (p.62)
Ruthie becomes more and more pulled under the addictive detachedness of Sylvie:
"...it seemed to me that there need not be relic, remnant, margin, residue, momento, bequest, memory, thought, track, or trace, if only the darkness could be perfect and permanent." (p.116)
Neither Sylvie nor Ruthie are attached to anything of value in the house for "To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow." (p.152) but rather filled it with detritus "because she considered accumulation to be the essence of housekeeping." (p.180).
Lucille has since abandoned Sylvie and Ruthie to live a "normal" life in town while the other two women ruminate about sorrow:
"Every sorrow suggests a thousand songs, and every song recalls a thousand sorrows, and so there are infinite in number and all the same." (p.194)
"...sometimes I think sorrow is a predatory thing because birds scream at dawn with a marvelous terror." (p.198)
The town becomes alarmed and yet "timid about threading the labyrinths of [their] privacy" (p.182) and all that is left to do for Sylvie and Ruthie is flight - across the fateful railroad tracks over the lake to a life of vagrancy.
Perhaps this book is too depressing given the current political climate, but perhaps it also explains a mindset of the small towns of the red states that are so terrified of change and their vengeful god that they will cling to anything to maintain a semblance of normalcy- because the alternative of rootlessness represented by Sylvie and Ruthie scares them even more.
A beautiful book and one that makes me with to read her Pulitzer winning Gilead.
The motif of housekeeping is evoked by the pristine state of the awkward house built by the not-so-talented hands of their deceased grandfather while they are cared for by their two aunts Lily and Nona who escape as soon as another aunt Sylvie comes to take care of the girls. From this point on, the house deteriorates: there is a flood which rots away the furniture and books and Sylvie is so dislocated in her own mind that she collects garbage and paper and the girls start skipping school.
The atmosphere in the story is relatively mournful and heavy:
"A narrow pond would form in the orchard, water clear as air covering grass and black leaves and fallen branches, all around it black leaves and drenched grass and fallen branches, and on it an image in an eye, sky clouds, trees, our hovering faced and our cold hands." (p.5)
"Fingerbone was never an impressive town. It was chastened by an outsized landscape and extravagant weather chastened again by an awareness that the whole of human history had occurred elsewhere." (p.62)
Ruthie becomes more and more pulled under the addictive detachedness of Sylvie:
"...it seemed to me that there need not be relic, remnant, margin, residue, momento, bequest, memory, thought, track, or trace, if only the darkness could be perfect and permanent." (p.116)
Neither Sylvie nor Ruthie are attached to anything of value in the house for "To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow." (p.152) but rather filled it with detritus "because she considered accumulation to be the essence of housekeeping." (p.180).
Lucille has since abandoned Sylvie and Ruthie to live a "normal" life in town while the other two women ruminate about sorrow:
"Every sorrow suggests a thousand songs, and every song recalls a thousand sorrows, and so there are infinite in number and all the same." (p.194)
"...sometimes I think sorrow is a predatory thing because birds scream at dawn with a marvelous terror." (p.198)
The town becomes alarmed and yet "timid about threading the labyrinths of [their] privacy" (p.182) and all that is left to do for Sylvie and Ruthie is flight - across the fateful railroad tracks over the lake to a life of vagrancy.
Perhaps this book is too depressing given the current political climate, but perhaps it also explains a mindset of the small towns of the red states that are so terrified of change and their vengeful god that they will cling to anything to maintain a semblance of normalcy- because the alternative of rootlessness represented by Sylvie and Ruthie scares them even more.
A beautiful book and one that makes me with to read her Pulitzer winning Gilead.
December 27, 2018
I found it difficult to read, but yet I didn’t want it to end . Difficult because it was somber and dark and slow moving and sad. Yet, this quiet story with such beautiful prose kept me wanting more. Wanting to know what would be the fate of two young girls who never knew their father, lose their mother to suicide and are left in the hands of a series of relatives over the years living in the same house built by their grandfather. The writing is so clear that you can feel the cold and dampness in this place called Fingerbone, and see the darkness outside as well as in this house. Ruthie narrates telling her story and her younger sister Lucille’s story, but it in many ways is the story of the family, of their grandparents, their mother and their aunts , especially Sylvie who comes to live with them when the others die or leave. It’s a haunting tale of abandonment, loneliness, loss, and these characters trying to forge an identity which in many ways has been shaped for them by this family history. I was drawn to Robinson’s beautiful writing and her amazing story telling in the Gilead trilogy and was equally taken by this, her first novel. 4.5 stars because even though a short book, it felt a little slow moving, but overall I can’t give it less than 5 stars. Her work is a treasure that will remain with me for a long time to come. I hope she will grace us with more of her writing.
December 2, 2021
Housekeeping ,c1980, Marilynne Robinson
Housekeeping 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-being is questioned by the courts, Sylvie returns to life on the road and takes Ruthie with her.
The novel treats the subject of housekeeping, not only in the domestic sense of cleaning, but in the larger sense of keeping a spiritual home for one's self and family in the face of loss, for the girls experience a series of abandonment as they come of age.
The events take place in an uncertain time, in that no dates are mentioned; however, Ruthie refers to her grandfather living in a sod dugout in the Midwest, before his journey to Fingerbone, while she herself traverses adolescence sometime in the latter half of the 20th century, as Ruthie reads the novel Not as a Stranger, a bestseller from 1954.
تاریخ نخستین خوانش: از روز دهم ماه آگوست سال2015میلادی تا روز هفدهم ماه آگوست سال2016میلادی
عنوان: خانه داری (رمان)؛ نویسنده: مریلین رابینسون؛ مترجم: مرجان محمدی؛ تهران، آموت، سال1393، در272ص، شابک9786006605395؛ موضوع داستانهای نویسندگان ایالات متحده آمریکا - سده20میلادی
نخستین رمان بانو: «مریلین رابینسون»، همین کتاب است؛ نقل از پشت جلد کتاب (برنده ی جایزه کتاب ملی سال2008میلادی؛ برنده اورنج طلایی انگلیس در سال2009میلادی؛ نامزد جایزه ایمپک دوبلین در سال2010میلادی؛ بهترین کتاب سال واشنگتن پست؛ پرفروشترین کتاب نیویورک تایمز؛ بهترین کتاب سال و برنده جایزه کتاب لوس آنجلس تایمز؛ بهترین کتاب از طرف روزنامه سان فرانسیسکو کرونیکل، بزرگترین روزنامه شمال کالیفرنیا.)؛ پایان نقل
داستان زندگی «روث»، و خواهر کوچکترش، «لوسیل» را، بازگو میکند؛ این دو خواهر، نخست، با سرپرستی مادربزرگ توانا، و مهربان خود، بزرگوار شده، و پس از آن، در کنار عمه ی عجیب و غریبشان «سیلوی»، زندگی را، سپری میکنند؛ خانه ی پدری آنها، در محله ای کوچک، و در کنار برکه ای قرار دارد؛ در نزدیکی همین برکه بود، که پدربزرگ این دو دختر، در حادثه ی تصادف قطار، کشته شد، و مادر آنها نیز، در همین محل، با ماشین، از دره ای به پایین افتاد، و جانش را از دست داد؛ دشواریها، و کشمکشهای «روث»، و «لوسیل»، در رویارویی با «بلوغ»، و «تغییرات زندگی»، به زیبایی برای خوانشگر، به تصویر کشیده شده اند، و داستان کتاب، بر موضوعاتی اساسی همچون «نبودن ها»، «مبارزه با دشواریها، و کامیابی بر آنها»، و همچنین بر «ناپایداری»، و «گذرا بودن زندگی»، واژه های سخن نگارنده را، آراسته است
تاریخ بهنگام رسانی 29/10/1399هجری خورشیدی؛ 10/09/1400هجری خورشیدی؛ ا. شربیانی
Housekeeping 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-being is questioned by the courts, Sylvie returns to life on the road and takes Ruthie with her.
The novel treats the subject of housekeeping, not only in the domestic sense of cleaning, but in the larger sense of keeping a spiritual home for one's self and family in the face of loss, for the girls experience a series of abandonment as they come of age.
The events take place in an uncertain time, in that no dates are mentioned; however, Ruthie refers to her grandfather living in a sod dugout in the Midwest, before his journey to Fingerbone, while she herself traverses adolescence sometime in the latter half of the 20th century, as Ruthie reads the novel Not as a Stranger, a bestseller from 1954.
تاریخ نخستین خوانش: از روز دهم ماه آگوست سال2015میلادی تا روز هفدهم ماه آگوست سال2016میلادی
عنوان: خانه داری (رمان)؛ نویسنده: مریلین رابینسون؛ مترجم: مرجان محمدی؛ تهران، آموت، سال1393، در272ص، شابک9786006605395؛ موضوع داستانهای نویسندگان ایالات متحده آمریکا - سده20میلادی
نخستین رمان بانو: «مریلین رابینسون»، همین کتاب است؛ نقل از پشت جلد کتاب (برنده ی جایزه کتاب ملی سال2008میلادی؛ برنده اورنج طلایی انگلیس در سال2009میلادی؛ نامزد جایزه ایمپک دوبلین در سال2010میلادی؛ بهترین کتاب سال واشنگتن پست؛ پرفروشترین کتاب نیویورک تایمز؛ بهترین کتاب سال و برنده جایزه کتاب لوس آنجلس تایمز؛ بهترین کتاب از طرف روزنامه سان فرانسیسکو کرونیکل، بزرگترین روزنامه شمال کالیفرنیا.)؛ پایان نقل
داستان زندگی «روث»، و خواهر کوچکترش، «لوسیل» را، بازگو میکند؛ این دو خواهر، نخست، با سرپرستی مادربزرگ توانا، و مهربان خود، بزرگوار شده، و پس از آن، در کنار عمه ی عجیب و غریبشان «سیلوی»، زندگی را، سپری میکنند؛ خانه ی پدری آنها، در محله ای کوچک، و در کنار برکه ای قرار دارد؛ در نزدیکی همین برکه بود، که پدربزرگ این دو دختر، در حادثه ی تصادف قطار، کشته شد، و مادر آنها نیز، در همین محل، با ماشین، از دره ای به پایین افتاد، و جانش را از دست داد؛ دشواریها، و کشمکشهای «روث»، و «لوسیل»، در رویارویی با «بلوغ»، و «تغییرات زندگی»، به زیبایی برای خوانشگر، به تصویر کشیده شده اند، و داستان کتاب، بر موضوعاتی اساسی همچون «نبودن ها»، «مبارزه با دشواریها، و کامیابی بر آنها»، و همچنین بر «ناپایداری»، و «گذرا بودن زندگی»، واژه های سخن نگارنده را، آراسته است
تاریخ بهنگام رسانی 29/10/1399هجری خورشیدی؛ 10/09/1400هجری خورشیدی؛ ا. شربیانی
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
December 3, 2020
“Everything that falls upon the eye is apparition, a sheet dropped over the world’s true workings. The nerves and the brain are tricked, and one is left with dreams that these specters loose their hands from ours and walk away, the curve of the back and the swing of the coat so familiar as to imply that they should be permanent fixtures of the world, when in fact nothing is more perishable.”
I read this novel in black and white. Perhaps I should say in black and white and shades of gray. Like an old photograph, that is slightly hazy or smudged. Or, like a dream that upon awakening the dreamer cannot be sure whether she dreamt in color or not. The recalled images are surely in black and white only. There’s a sense that the dream was an echo of something real, something remembered from a long time ago. Memories can be strange and fleeting. They can haunt you and hover at the periphery of your mind for a long time. They often shape who we are and what we become. Ruth, the narrator of this beautiful, surreal novel, relays to us a story of memories, abandonment, loneliness, and the transitory nature of objects and people. It’s a wonder of a story that grabbed hold of me and won’t let go.
“… once alone, it is impossible to believe that one could ever have been otherwise. Loneliness is an absolute discovery. When one looks from inside at a lighted window, or looks from above at the lake, one sees the image of oneself in a lighted room, the image of oneself among trees and sky – the deception is obvious, but flattering all the same. When one looks from the darkness into the light, however, one sees all the difference between here and there, this and that.”
Ruth and younger sister Lucille know something about loss. It’s a part of their very fiber, passed on to them from the time their grandfather’s train plunged into the depths of the lake in Fingerbone, a small, western town bordering the mountains. The lake not only took their grandfather, but demanded much more. It laid claim to the psyches of his three daughters; it had the power to destroy land and people alike. Those not caught directly in its clutches would still be haunted by its presence. When Aunt Sylvie returns to Fingerbone to care for Ruth and Lucille and to set up housekeeping in her unconventional manner, the three come under the scrutiny of the townspeople. Sylvie is a drifter and her behavior has a profound effect on her nieces in very different ways. The story, though reflective and slow-paced initially, eventually reaches an inescapable and breathtaking climax.
I’ve read Marilynn Robinson’s writing before, and her Gilead trilogy (well, now a tetralogy with the recent publication of Jack) remains one of my favorite sets of novels. Housekeeping has a different tone than that of the others. It’s darker, more ethereal. I loved it just as much. In my opinion, Robinson is at the top of her craft, and I’m a forever fan.
“For why do our thoughts turn to some gesture of a hand, the fall of a sleeve, some corner of a room on a particular anonymous afternoon, even when we are asleep, and even when we are so old that our thoughts have abandoned other business? What are all these fragments for, if not to be knit up finally?”
I read this novel in black and white. Perhaps I should say in black and white and shades of gray. Like an old photograph, that is slightly hazy or smudged. Or, like a dream that upon awakening the dreamer cannot be sure whether she dreamt in color or not. The recalled images are surely in black and white only. There’s a sense that the dream was an echo of something real, something remembered from a long time ago. Memories can be strange and fleeting. They can haunt you and hover at the periphery of your mind for a long time. They often shape who we are and what we become. Ruth, the narrator of this beautiful, surreal novel, relays to us a story of memories, abandonment, loneliness, and the transitory nature of objects and people. It’s a wonder of a story that grabbed hold of me and won’t let go.
“… once alone, it is impossible to believe that one could ever have been otherwise. Loneliness is an absolute discovery. When one looks from inside at a lighted window, or looks from above at the lake, one sees the image of oneself in a lighted room, the image of oneself among trees and sky – the deception is obvious, but flattering all the same. When one looks from the darkness into the light, however, one sees all the difference between here and there, this and that.”
Ruth and younger sister Lucille know something about loss. It’s a part of their very fiber, passed on to them from the time their grandfather’s train plunged into the depths of the lake in Fingerbone, a small, western town bordering the mountains. The lake not only took their grandfather, but demanded much more. It laid claim to the psyches of his three daughters; it had the power to destroy land and people alike. Those not caught directly in its clutches would still be haunted by its presence. When Aunt Sylvie returns to Fingerbone to care for Ruth and Lucille and to set up housekeeping in her unconventional manner, the three come under the scrutiny of the townspeople. Sylvie is a drifter and her behavior has a profound effect on her nieces in very different ways. The story, though reflective and slow-paced initially, eventually reaches an inescapable and breathtaking climax.
I’ve read Marilynn Robinson’s writing before, and her Gilead trilogy (well, now a tetralogy with the recent publication of Jack) remains one of my favorite sets of novels. Housekeeping has a different tone than that of the others. It’s darker, more ethereal. I loved it just as much. In my opinion, Robinson is at the top of her craft, and I’m a forever fan.
“For why do our thoughts turn to some gesture of a hand, the fall of a sleeve, some corner of a room on a particular anonymous afternoon, even when we are asleep, and even when we are so old that our thoughts have abandoned other business? What are all these fragments for, if not to be knit up finally?”
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August 16, 2022
LA RAGAZZA DEL LAGO
Immagine dalla sigla di testa della serie Les revenants, ambientata e girata in Savoia intorno ad Annecy. Ma questo lago invece è in Italia, a Capestrano, in Abruzzo
Pur se con atmosfera radicalmente diversa, questo romanzo mi ha spesso fatto pensare a Les Revenants.
Immagino che sia per la forte presenza del lago, un elemento importante della narrazione, così come nel film, e nella serie tv che da quello è stata tratta. Un luogo che assume ruolo di personaggio.
Il lago di queste pagine, il lago di Fingerbone, Idaho, è un essere vivente: respira, pulsa, nutre, genera, è pieno di gente, e di cose, perfino un intero treno, nasconde, conserva, si estende, e si restringe, una volta l’anno allaga il paese. Si è portato via sia il nonno di Ruth, l’Io narrante, sia la sua stessa mamma.
Il lago di Capodacqua a Capestrano, in provincia dell’Aquila
Ma come dicevo, l’atmosfera è molto diversa da Les Revenants: qui siamo piuttosto dalle parti di Ralph Waldo Emerson e del suo romantico concepire il mondo vegetale, del suo sentimento di unione mistica con la natura.
Le parole che seguono sono sue, e secondo me spiegano bene anche la poetica di Marilynne Robinson:
Stando sulla nuda terra, il capo immerso nell’aria serena e sollevato nell’infinito spazio, ogni meschino egotismo svanisce. Divento un occhio trasparente, non sono niente, vedo tutto; le correnti dell’essere universale circolano attraverso di me; sono una parte o una particella di Dio.
L’occhio trasparente assorbe più che riflettere, accoglie tutto quello che la Natura ha da offrire, è lo strumento per fondersi con la Natura, che ci protegge se ci mescoliamo all’energia e alla bellezza che dio ha disperso nel mondo (cioè, nella Natura). Emerson considerava questa sua teoria una posizione scientifica tanto strutturata quanto la Bibbia.
Ruth e sua sorella Lucille insieme alla zia Sylvie, nell’omonimo film del 1987 (in italiano Una donna tutta particolare). La regia è di Bill Forsyth, di cui ho molto apprezzato il suo Local Hero.
La stessa casa dove abita Ruth con sua sorella minore, Lucille, sembra parte della Natura, non è un’entità chiusa, ma partecipa del mondo vegetale che la circonda: condivide vegetazione, polvere, ragnatele, mancano i vetri alle finestre, è regolata dal principio di accumulazione (di lattine, di giornali vecchi…), i gatti portano dentro uccellini morti, i topi e i ragni sono accolti, più con rassegnazione che con vero entusiasmo.
La vita nel petto di tutte le creature, umane animali e vegetali, forse batte piano, ma batte uguale in tutto e per tutti, con la certezza che il giorno come sempre sarà.
L’housekeeping del titolo non è l’economia domestica, non le cure domestiche in senso stretto, ma nel senso più ampio: di fronte alla perdita, mantenere una rifugio spirituale per se stessi e la famiglia, per le ragazze che nel loro percorso di crescita sperimentano una serie di abbandoni.
È tutto uno sparire: il nonno nel lago, la madre, la nonna, il padre più o meno ignoto, le prozie…
La zia Sylvie, sorella minore della madre, che torna a casa per prendersi cura (non molto domestica) delle ragazze, si comporta come una sorella, maggiore solo per età anagrafica, ma certo non svolge la funzione materna.
È una donna che, come dice lei stessa, “ha perso di vista” il marito da un bel po’, ha vissuto a lungo come una hobo, da vagabonda, salendo al volo sui treni merci per spostarsi da un posto all’altro, senza una meta, senza un piano. Si porta dietro uno stile di vita eccentrico, e soprattutto brado, con poche lasche regole, e nessuna imposizione, la negazione del concetto d’autorità di cui si dice i figli hanno invece necessità.
Anche in casa dorme vestita sdraiata sul letto, senza togliersi le scarpe, pronta a partire, andare, tornare, e partire di nuovo.
Il nonno di Ruth, quello che scompare col treno nel lago, regalò alla moglie un orologio da tasca da usare come collana sul quale aveva dipinto una coppia di cavallucci marini. La nonna desiderava vederli persino mentre li stava guardando.
Il romanzo è ambientato nel corso degli anni Cinquanta, ma tranne pochi accenni (le automobili, l’elettricità���), potrebbe essere anche il secolo precedente, nessuna eco della guerra mondiale, né di altro evento storico.
Mi pare che l’unico modo per datarlo con qualche certezza sia dal titolo di un libro che Ruth legge, Nessuno resta solo (Not As a Stranger) di Morton Thompson, che fu un bestseller nel 1954, e da cui venne tratto un film con Olivia de Havilland e Robert Mitchum, diretto da Stanley Kramer.
Ci sono alcuni momenti (scene?) che spiccano per bellezza: l’incidente del treno che cade nel lago, le ricerche dei sommozzatori; i giochi con i cani e le passeggiate sul lago ghiacciato; i duetti delle prozie (esilaranti, sembra di sentirli! E di vederli. Se ci fosse anche un pizzico di ferocia sembrerebbe di leggere la Grande Signorina, Ivy Compton-Burnett! Peccato le due donne spariscano presto, se ne sente la mancanza); l’accensione della luce nel buio della cucina durante una cena; le conversazioni della zia con le donne del paese che vengono in visita recando in dono cibi nutrienti accolte in un salotto invaso da pile di giornali vecchi…
Siamo in presenza di un esordio strepitoso che annuncia da subito una scrittrice di razza (che dopo questo primo romanzo, lasciò passare ventiquattro anni prima di produrre il secondo).
Una scrittrice che guarda indietro, e sceglie come fonti d’ispirazione i grandi dell’Ottocento.
Trovo speciale questo articolo di Nicola Lagioia che racconta la sua intervista a Marilynne Robinson e dichiara il suo amore incondizionato per la sua scrittura.
http://www.internazionale.it/opinione...
L’ammirazione tra artisti quando non è piaggeria è contagiosa.
Come in quest’altro caso, semplicemente meraviglioso:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQ7qK...
Immagine dalla sigla di testa della serie Les revenants, ambientata e girata in Savoia intorno ad Annecy. Ma questo lago invece è in Italia, a Capestrano, in Abruzzo
Pur se con atmosfera radicalmente diversa, questo romanzo mi ha spesso fatto pensare a Les Revenants.
Immagino che sia per la forte presenza del lago, un elemento importante della narrazione, così come nel film, e nella serie tv che da quello è stata tratta. Un luogo che assume ruolo di personaggio.
Il lago di queste pagine, il lago di Fingerbone, Idaho, è un essere vivente: respira, pulsa, nutre, genera, è pieno di gente, e di cose, perfino un intero treno, nasconde, conserva, si estende, e si restringe, una volta l’anno allaga il paese. Si è portato via sia il nonno di Ruth, l’Io narrante, sia la sua stessa mamma.
Il lago di Capodacqua a Capestrano, in provincia dell’Aquila
Ma come dicevo, l’atmosfera è molto diversa da Les Revenants: qui siamo piuttosto dalle parti di Ralph Waldo Emerson e del suo romantico concepire il mondo vegetale, del suo sentimento di unione mistica con la natura.
Le parole che seguono sono sue, e secondo me spiegano bene anche la poetica di Marilynne Robinson:
Stando sulla nuda terra, il capo immerso nell’aria serena e sollevato nell’infinito spazio, ogni meschino egotismo svanisce. Divento un occhio trasparente, non sono niente, vedo tutto; le correnti dell’essere universale circolano attraverso di me; sono una parte o una particella di Dio.
L’occhio trasparente assorbe più che riflettere, accoglie tutto quello che la Natura ha da offrire, è lo strumento per fondersi con la Natura, che ci protegge se ci mescoliamo all’energia e alla bellezza che dio ha disperso nel mondo (cioè, nella Natura). Emerson considerava questa sua teoria una posizione scientifica tanto strutturata quanto la Bibbia.
Ruth e sua sorella Lucille insieme alla zia Sylvie, nell’omonimo film del 1987 (in italiano Una donna tutta particolare). La regia è di Bill Forsyth, di cui ho molto apprezzato il suo Local Hero.
La stessa casa dove abita Ruth con sua sorella minore, Lucille, sembra parte della Natura, non è un’entità chiusa, ma partecipa del mondo vegetale che la circonda: condivide vegetazione, polvere, ragnatele, mancano i vetri alle finestre, è regolata dal principio di accumulazione (di lattine, di giornali vecchi…), i gatti portano dentro uccellini morti, i topi e i ragni sono accolti, più con rassegnazione che con vero entusiasmo.
La vita nel petto di tutte le creature, umane animali e vegetali, forse batte piano, ma batte uguale in tutto e per tutti, con la certezza che il giorno come sempre sarà.
L’housekeeping del titolo non è l’economia domestica, non le cure domestiche in senso stretto, ma nel senso più ampio: di fronte alla perdita, mantenere una rifugio spirituale per se stessi e la famiglia, per le ragazze che nel loro percorso di crescita sperimentano una serie di abbandoni.
È tutto uno sparire: il nonno nel lago, la madre, la nonna, il padre più o meno ignoto, le prozie…
La zia Sylvie, sorella minore della madre, che torna a casa per prendersi cura (non molto domestica) delle ragazze, si comporta come una sorella, maggiore solo per età anagrafica, ma certo non svolge la funzione materna.
È una donna che, come dice lei stessa, “ha perso di vista” il marito da un bel po’, ha vissuto a lungo come una hobo, da vagabonda, salendo al volo sui treni merci per spostarsi da un posto all’altro, senza una meta, senza un piano. Si porta dietro uno stile di vita eccentrico, e soprattutto brado, con poche lasche regole, e nessuna imposizione, la negazione del concetto d’autorità di cui si dice i figli hanno invece necessità.
Anche in casa dorme vestita sdraiata sul letto, senza togliersi le scarpe, pronta a partire, andare, tornare, e partire di nuovo.
Il nonno di Ruth, quello che scompare col treno nel lago, regalò alla moglie un orologio da tasca da usare come collana sul quale aveva dipinto una coppia di cavallucci marini. La nonna desiderava vederli persino mentre li stava guardando.
Il romanzo è ambientato nel corso degli anni Cinquanta, ma tranne pochi accenni (le automobili, l’elettricità���), potrebbe essere anche il secolo precedente, nessuna eco della guerra mondiale, né di altro evento storico.
Mi pare che l’unico modo per datarlo con qualche certezza sia dal titolo di un libro che Ruth legge, Nessuno resta solo (Not As a Stranger) di Morton Thompson, che fu un bestseller nel 1954, e da cui venne tratto un film con Olivia de Havilland e Robert Mitchum, diretto da Stanley Kramer.
Ci sono alcuni momenti (scene?) che spiccano per bellezza: l’incidente del treno che cade nel lago, le ricerche dei sommozzatori; i giochi con i cani e le passeggiate sul lago ghiacciato; i duetti delle prozie (esilaranti, sembra di sentirli! E di vederli. Se ci fosse anche un pizzico di ferocia sembrerebbe di leggere la Grande Signorina, Ivy Compton-Burnett! Peccato le due donne spariscano presto, se ne sente la mancanza); l’accensione della luce nel buio della cucina durante una cena; le conversazioni della zia con le donne del paese che vengono in visita recando in dono cibi nutrienti accolte in un salotto invaso da pile di giornali vecchi…
Siamo in presenza di un esordio strepitoso che annuncia da subito una scrittrice di razza (che dopo questo primo romanzo, lasciò passare ventiquattro anni prima di produrre il secondo).
Una scrittrice che guarda indietro, e sceglie come fonti d’ispirazione i grandi dell’Ottocento.
Trovo speciale questo articolo di Nicola Lagioia che racconta la sua intervista a Marilynne Robinson e dichiara il suo amore incondizionato per la sua scrittura.
http://www.internazionale.it/opinione...
L’ammirazione tra artisti quando non è piaggeria è contagiosa.
Come in quest’altro caso, semplicemente meraviglioso:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQ7qK...
October 11, 2008
Two things you should know about my thoughts on Housekeeping:
1) I think Housekeeping is a great book.
2) Finishing Housekeeping gave me a palpable sense of relief.
Housekeeping is darker and more intense than the author’s better-known Gilead . The former is also a tougher read; even the most careful reader would, I imagine, find herself returning to some passages a few times in an attempt to follow the beautiful but difficult language. So while I don’t regret reading a tough and rewarding novel, by any stretch, there were moments when I felt like I was reading the damn book because it was good for me but not very much fun. And even though I marked and will later photocopy some passages, and I would gladly recommend Housekeeping to anyone up for a caliginous and meticulous exploration of loss, depth, and identity, I’d sure as hell point out the ride wasn’t going to be easy.
Not a resounding recommendation, eh? Well, I’m giving the book four stars, more than I give most books, and I might read the book again someday. Housekeeping seems like the type of book I’d want to read again. And although the psychological and metaphorical (I’m deathly afraid of drowning, thank you very much, and underwater metaphors lurk on just about every page) explorations are intense, the book will haunt me in ways that I can appreciate for the foreseeable future. Check it out. You are warned.
1) I think Housekeeping is a great book.
2) Finishing Housekeeping gave me a palpable sense of relief.
Housekeeping is darker and more intense than the author’s better-known Gilead . The former is also a tougher read; even the most careful reader would, I imagine, find herself returning to some passages a few times in an attempt to follow the beautiful but difficult language. So while I don’t regret reading a tough and rewarding novel, by any stretch, there were moments when I felt like I was reading the damn book because it was good for me but not very much fun. And even though I marked and will later photocopy some passages, and I would gladly recommend Housekeeping to anyone up for a caliginous and meticulous exploration of loss, depth, and identity, I’d sure as hell point out the ride wasn’t going to be easy.
Not a resounding recommendation, eh? Well, I’m giving the book four stars, more than I give most books, and I might read the book again someday. Housekeeping seems like the type of book I’d want to read again. And although the psychological and metaphorical (I’m deathly afraid of drowning, thank you very much, and underwater metaphors lurk on just about every page) explorations are intense, the book will haunt me in ways that I can appreciate for the foreseeable future. Check it out. You are warned.
July 14, 2008
I'm going to throw the gauntlet down and say that I thought this book was terribly overrated considering how many of my friends--whose taste I've come to respect--recommended it to me. All the critics from 1980 seemed amazed that this was a debut. Seemed like a first novel to me.
The thing that people praise most about the book was the beauty of her language. I'll admit that there were some wonderful passages, and some great imagery, but there was just as much "writerly" prose, overwritten prose, pyrite prose. I felt like I was possessed by the spirit George Orwell as again and again I read poor word choices: "achromatic" for "colorless;" "simulacra" for "semblance." These words are not poetic substitutes but verge on jargon. Blandishment? Come on. That's about as poetic as "esophagus."
I also thought the philosophical meanderings of Ruthie bordered on pretentiousness: "So memory pulls us forward, so prophecy is only brilliant memory--there will be a garden where all of us as one child will sleep in our mother Eve, hooped in her ribs and staved by her spine." Whenever it appeared, this vague, didactic prose seemed to stifle what little story there was. And let's not forget that these ideas could never have come from the mind of Ruthie, teen aged or aged. One who spends her days trying desperately to be ignored and can barely speak does not later become a meditator on memory and the Garden of Eden.
I probably would have been more forgiving of the novel in these aspects if I thought there was a strong story. There is not. Rather, Robinson decided that a gauzy, limp tale of loss would preclude the need for any kind sustained dramatic tension. We are treated to uninspiring characters with no real redeeming qualities. The only dynamo in the story is Lucille and because of her conforming attitude, we are distanced from identifying with her. Instead, we get to hang out with Ruthie, the world's most inactive protagonist.
Now, I will qualify everything. I will say that I did enjoy chapters 4-8. I actually enjoyed them a lot. The conflict between the two sisters was wonderful. But a good middle does not make a good book. The first two chapters were all but unnecessary--drawn out exposition that could easily have been woven into the rest of the book--and the ending just fell flat. What was Robinson trying to say? That grief makes you drift? That the power of memory can drag you towards oblivion? I think my frustration stems partly from dashed hopes that the ending would unite and triumph. Instead, I was left with a handful of images, nothing more.
The thing that people praise most about the book was the beauty of her language. I'll admit that there were some wonderful passages, and some great imagery, but there was just as much "writerly" prose, overwritten prose, pyrite prose. I felt like I was possessed by the spirit George Orwell as again and again I read poor word choices: "achromatic" for "colorless;" "simulacra" for "semblance." These words are not poetic substitutes but verge on jargon. Blandishment? Come on. That's about as poetic as "esophagus."
I also thought the philosophical meanderings of Ruthie bordered on pretentiousness: "So memory pulls us forward, so prophecy is only brilliant memory--there will be a garden where all of us as one child will sleep in our mother Eve, hooped in her ribs and staved by her spine." Whenever it appeared, this vague, didactic prose seemed to stifle what little story there was. And let's not forget that these ideas could never have come from the mind of Ruthie, teen aged or aged. One who spends her days trying desperately to be ignored and can barely speak does not later become a meditator on memory and the Garden of Eden.
I probably would have been more forgiving of the novel in these aspects if I thought there was a strong story. There is not. Rather, Robinson decided that a gauzy, limp tale of loss would preclude the need for any kind sustained dramatic tension. We are treated to uninspiring characters with no real redeeming qualities. The only dynamo in the story is Lucille and because of her conforming attitude, we are distanced from identifying with her. Instead, we get to hang out with Ruthie, the world's most inactive protagonist.
Now, I will qualify everything. I will say that I did enjoy chapters 4-8. I actually enjoyed them a lot. The conflict between the two sisters was wonderful. But a good middle does not make a good book. The first two chapters were all but unnecessary--drawn out exposition that could easily have been woven into the rest of the book--and the ending just fell flat. What was Robinson trying to say? That grief makes you drift? That the power of memory can drag you towards oblivion? I think my frustration stems partly from dashed hopes that the ending would unite and triumph. Instead, I was left with a handful of images, nothing more.
December 3, 2018
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, sometimes you have to hold up your hands and acknowledge you weren't quite able, for one reason or another, to bestow the mental energy a novel asks of you.
February 8, 2018
“Housekeeping” is an introspective, almost ethereal coming of age story that navigates the hazy division between presence and absence, loss and survival, radiance and darkness.
Lucille and Ruthie have been left to the care of their elderly grandmother in Fingerbone, their mother’s natal village in Idaho. When the old woman passes away, their eccentric aunt Sylvie returns to Fingerbone with her unorthodox personality and her particular way of understanding life that will open a chasm between the two sisters. Sylvie discards everything she considers superfluous and acts accordingly to her transient essence. She meanders at night, listening to the silence of darkness, finding comfort in it, not minding the impression she might be making to the disapproving neighbors. Her priorities do not correspond to the tangible aspects of daily life.
As they grow, Lucille and Ruthie will be confronted with the uncertain nature of existence and they will have to choose between the rituals of a socially accepted normality or embrace Sylvie’s deeper vision of a parallel world where memories, dreams and reality become a permanent heritage in detriment of material stability.
The story is replete with symbols that acquire mystical magnitude: a lake that floods the region recalling Biblical myths, the dark, dense woods of the nearby area, an abandoned house with a life of its own with ghostly children that only those who are in tune with silence can hear.
The recurrent idea that we feel absent family members more keenly when they are gone resonates throughout the book with spiritual force; and the unfathomable deep waters of a lake become a kind of heaven where those we loved find shelter, never to return to us physically, although they remain forever present in our dreams and memories, evoking the best version of any alternative reality.
Reading Robinson’s prose is like a sensory experience. The unruly quality of abstract thoughts captured in immaculate words makes it beautiful like the wilderness, like some untamable creature that can’t be caught, only admired from afar. It has a life beyond the reader’s consciousness.
Sometimes, it also reads like poetry, for there is total harmony in the slow paced hues of the narrative voice and the uncommon sensitivity that gives sustenance to the sinuous meditations on identity, loneliness and belonging the novel revolves around.
Robinson reminds us how useless it is to hoard material richness as we will leave this world in the same way that we came into it. Unwillingly, helpless, bared, innocent. Her solitary chant is easy to forget in the hasty, superficial practicalities of living, but we should tune our ears to the sound of her music, which transcends corporal boundaries. There is no more doleful or beauteous melody than that, than hearing a soul sing.
Lucille and Ruthie have been left to the care of their elderly grandmother in Fingerbone, their mother’s natal village in Idaho. When the old woman passes away, their eccentric aunt Sylvie returns to Fingerbone with her unorthodox personality and her particular way of understanding life that will open a chasm between the two sisters. Sylvie discards everything she considers superfluous and acts accordingly to her transient essence. She meanders at night, listening to the silence of darkness, finding comfort in it, not minding the impression she might be making to the disapproving neighbors. Her priorities do not correspond to the tangible aspects of daily life.
As they grow, Lucille and Ruthie will be confronted with the uncertain nature of existence and they will have to choose between the rituals of a socially accepted normality or embrace Sylvie’s deeper vision of a parallel world where memories, dreams and reality become a permanent heritage in detriment of material stability.
The story is replete with symbols that acquire mystical magnitude: a lake that floods the region recalling Biblical myths, the dark, dense woods of the nearby area, an abandoned house with a life of its own with ghostly children that only those who are in tune with silence can hear.
The recurrent idea that we feel absent family members more keenly when they are gone resonates throughout the book with spiritual force; and the unfathomable deep waters of a lake become a kind of heaven where those we loved find shelter, never to return to us physically, although they remain forever present in our dreams and memories, evoking the best version of any alternative reality.
Reading Robinson’s prose is like a sensory experience. The unruly quality of abstract thoughts captured in immaculate words makes it beautiful like the wilderness, like some untamable creature that can’t be caught, only admired from afar. It has a life beyond the reader’s consciousness.
Sometimes, it also reads like poetry, for there is total harmony in the slow paced hues of the narrative voice and the uncommon sensitivity that gives sustenance to the sinuous meditations on identity, loneliness and belonging the novel revolves around.
Robinson reminds us how useless it is to hoard material richness as we will leave this world in the same way that we came into it. Unwillingly, helpless, bared, innocent. Her solitary chant is easy to forget in the hasty, superficial practicalities of living, but we should tune our ears to the sound of her music, which transcends corporal boundaries. There is no more doleful or beauteous melody than that, than hearing a soul sing.
November 21, 2023
"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 Rapids and read the opening page and found it rich and deep and I set it back down. About to descend into my own Dark Night of the Soul, in the next 3-4 years, I perhaps anticipated how unprepared I was to read this book. And now I am ready, and it was amazing to experience. This book has some of the most breathtaking and astonishing sentences I have read in a long time. I first read it two years ago and now have reread it again for a class.
Maybe it is because I have been reading so many graphic novels, I have been reading quickly, maybe too quickly, but this book forces you to read very very slowly; you didn't want to miss a single word.
The book takes place in a small western city, Fingerbone, on a lake. Ruthie is the narrator, and for much of the book she is almost inseparable from her sister, Lucille. Early on we learn that their grandfather, Edmund Foster, a trainman, has died, his train plummeting off the bridge into the lake. Then, his daughter, Helen, Ruthie and Lucille's mother, returns from Spokane to Fingerbone to visit her own mother living there, leaves the young girls with their grandmother, and drives her borrowed car off a cliff into that same lake. Grandmother is in no shape to raise two grandkids she doesn't even know. As the story goes, she will later live with two odd and also constitutionally-unable-to-parent great-aunts and then Sylvie, another odd aunt. Seem crazy? But maybe crazy is the wrong word. Robinson herself does not think any of her women are fundamentally crazy, but they do endure some trauma, of course.
What are the ripple effects of this trauma for Helen, Sylvie, Lucille and Ruth, of having lived through tragic death? What is memory and experience in the shaping of a life? In the process of our answering these questions, we meet along the way, usually just briefly, literally dozens of often (seemingly?) broken women, seen by Ruthie and Lucille and Ruth on passing trains, or talked to on trains by Sylvie, who was a drifter, a transient, a hobo. This parade of sad/mad women in the background of the main story provide a kind of thematic or imagistic backdrop to the tale, something I missed in my first reading. This is a book especially for and about women in a world of loss. How do they go on? Men hardly figure in the book, after Edmund's early death. We hardly meet them at all, except by reportage. This is a book about women's survival, coping and sometimes failing to cope with grief. The lake, the house, are also very much alive (and I think female) presences in this book.
Oh, and the crazy night Sylvie and Ruth spend on the boat on the lake, after waiting for the 9:52 train to come through, and reflecting on all those losses: "The lake must be full of people. I've heard stories all my life. And you can bet there were a lot of people on the train no one knew about." Sylvie is referring to the people who besides her father who died when the train plunged off the bridge into the lake. And a ripple effect of grief and loss for all the families who suffered these losses, and some of them, like her, transients, sleeping in the freight cars.
Ruthie, of her departed mother Helen: "She was a music I no longer heard, that rang in my mind, itself and nothing else, lost to all sense, but not perished, not perished." Are we talking of ghosts here? If you like, sure, but this is what we all know, the presence of the departed in our every day lives.
The image of Ruth, our narrator, a young girl, is unforgettable in this book: "It was a source of both terror and comfort to me then that I often seemed invisible — incompletely and minimally existent, in fact. It seemed to me that I made no impact on the world, and that in exchange I was privileged to watch it unawares.” Ruth's ghost-like presence is mirrored in the ghost of her mother and grandfather and all of her female family rendered ghost-like and nearly invisible through tragedy.
There is a Walpurgisnacht scene of burning that happens later in that is both frightening and breathtaking. The pace of the book is slow, very little seems to happen, but then there are these moments of very real drama and remarkable emotional effects in a few places, and in the climax of the book. I thought it was sometimes difficult--I need to read it once again for all the Biblical references--but finally astonishing and empathetic.
What does it mean to live in that house, in Fingerbone, or live on that water, in that town, with that past, with that darkness, with all that waiting, with memories, with that sudden need to leave, to get out, that most of the women come to feel? It took me 35 years to finally read this book, and it was worth the wait. And it was even better and deeper as I read it again.
PS: In this last reading I began to see the gothic influences in this book: the dark, the wild forces of nature, the tinge of the supernatural and the edge of madness. Ruthie says this is a town of murders and accidents, and Sylvie says there must be dozens of bodies in the lake, she's heard stories. Ruthie says she feels like she has become a ghost, like she describes most of the drifters passing through. But I don't think of it primarily as a ghost story; I think of it as a book about the trauma that comes to these women, and many women. And after three readings I am still haunted by and can't fully understand the ending, which I love because Ruthie and Sylvie, fingers crooked, beckon me, back to Fingerbone.
Spoiler alert: I think in the end Ruthie has joined her aunt Sylvie on the road, each traumatized by the death of a parent, not quite able to participate meaningfully in "civilized" society, increasingly invisible and ghostlike to the rest of the world, Ruthie cut off perhaps forever and sadly from her sister Lucille.
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 Rapids and read the opening page and found it rich and deep and I set it back down. About to descend into my own Dark Night of the Soul, in the next 3-4 years, I perhaps anticipated how unprepared I was to read this book. And now I am ready, and it was amazing to experience. This book has some of the most breathtaking and astonishing sentences I have read in a long time. I first read it two years ago and now have reread it again for a class.
Maybe it is because I have been reading so many graphic novels, I have been reading quickly, maybe too quickly, but this book forces you to read very very slowly; you didn't want to miss a single word.
The book takes place in a small western city, Fingerbone, on a lake. Ruthie is the narrator, and for much of the book she is almost inseparable from her sister, Lucille. Early on we learn that their grandfather, Edmund Foster, a trainman, has died, his train plummeting off the bridge into the lake. Then, his daughter, Helen, Ruthie and Lucille's mother, returns from Spokane to Fingerbone to visit her own mother living there, leaves the young girls with their grandmother, and drives her borrowed car off a cliff into that same lake. Grandmother is in no shape to raise two grandkids she doesn't even know. As the story goes, she will later live with two odd and also constitutionally-unable-to-parent great-aunts and then Sylvie, another odd aunt. Seem crazy? But maybe crazy is the wrong word. Robinson herself does not think any of her women are fundamentally crazy, but they do endure some trauma, of course.
What are the ripple effects of this trauma for Helen, Sylvie, Lucille and Ruth, of having lived through tragic death? What is memory and experience in the shaping of a life? In the process of our answering these questions, we meet along the way, usually just briefly, literally dozens of often (seemingly?) broken women, seen by Ruthie and Lucille and Ruth on passing trains, or talked to on trains by Sylvie, who was a drifter, a transient, a hobo. This parade of sad/mad women in the background of the main story provide a kind of thematic or imagistic backdrop to the tale, something I missed in my first reading. This is a book especially for and about women in a world of loss. How do they go on? Men hardly figure in the book, after Edmund's early death. We hardly meet them at all, except by reportage. This is a book about women's survival, coping and sometimes failing to cope with grief. The lake, the house, are also very much alive (and I think female) presences in this book.
Oh, and the crazy night Sylvie and Ruth spend on the boat on the lake, after waiting for the 9:52 train to come through, and reflecting on all those losses: "The lake must be full of people. I've heard stories all my life. And you can bet there were a lot of people on the train no one knew about." Sylvie is referring to the people who besides her father who died when the train plunged off the bridge into the lake. And a ripple effect of grief and loss for all the families who suffered these losses, and some of them, like her, transients, sleeping in the freight cars.
Ruthie, of her departed mother Helen: "She was a music I no longer heard, that rang in my mind, itself and nothing else, lost to all sense, but not perished, not perished." Are we talking of ghosts here? If you like, sure, but this is what we all know, the presence of the departed in our every day lives.
The image of Ruth, our narrator, a young girl, is unforgettable in this book: "It was a source of both terror and comfort to me then that I often seemed invisible — incompletely and minimally existent, in fact. It seemed to me that I made no impact on the world, and that in exchange I was privileged to watch it unawares.” Ruth's ghost-like presence is mirrored in the ghost of her mother and grandfather and all of her female family rendered ghost-like and nearly invisible through tragedy.
There is a Walpurgisnacht scene of burning that happens later in that is both frightening and breathtaking. The pace of the book is slow, very little seems to happen, but then there are these moments of very real drama and remarkable emotional effects in a few places, and in the climax of the book. I thought it was sometimes difficult--I need to read it once again for all the Biblical references--but finally astonishing and empathetic.
What does it mean to live in that house, in Fingerbone, or live on that water, in that town, with that past, with that darkness, with all that waiting, with memories, with that sudden need to leave, to get out, that most of the women come to feel? It took me 35 years to finally read this book, and it was worth the wait. And it was even better and deeper as I read it again.
PS: In this last reading I began to see the gothic influences in this book: the dark, the wild forces of nature, the tinge of the supernatural and the edge of madness. Ruthie says this is a town of murders and accidents, and Sylvie says there must be dozens of bodies in the lake, she's heard stories. Ruthie says she feels like she has become a ghost, like she describes most of the drifters passing through. But I don't think of it primarily as a ghost story; I think of it as a book about the trauma that comes to these women, and many women. And after three readings I am still haunted by and can't fully understand the ending, which I love because Ruthie and Sylvie, fingers crooked, beckon me, back to Fingerbone.
Spoiler alert: I think in the end Ruthie has joined her aunt Sylvie on the road, each traumatized by the death of a parent, not quite able to participate meaningfully in "civilized" society, increasingly invisible and ghostlike to the rest of the world, Ruthie cut off perhaps forever and sadly from her sister Lucille.
August 24, 2008
About a girl who really hates to talk and never talks but the author can't stop babbling. She just goes on and on and on and on and on.
The ending really sucks, just like the middle and the beginning.
The ending really sucks, just like the middle and the beginning.
October 17, 2019
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 the U.S., though never properly clarified).
The water rises up to meet the locals in Fingerbone, rises up to pull down their houses and barns, but it's dangerous as it lies still and dark in the lake, too, pulling down the passengers of trains and boats into its depths and drowning them.
The sweet baptisms of Gilead are missing here, the power of water to restore us, renew us. This story does not provide images of tree branches laden with blossoms and dew, splashing lightly over the head of the protagonist as he brushes past.
This is a harsh landscape, filled with deep water, a dark place where children are abandoned and then raised by a drifter, a hoarder who's more comfortable under an overpass than in the confines of a proper home.
Within this bleak landscape, we meet two disenfranchised girls, Ruth and Lucille, sisters who conjured other literary sisters for me: the Dashwoods of Sense and Sensibility, the Bennets of Pride and Prejudice, the Chase sisters of The Blind Assassin, and the Blackwood sisters of Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle.
Ruth and Lucille have only each other, and they place their sisterhood above all other things, as they have nothing else:
Having a sister or a friend is like sitting at night in a lighted house. Those outside can watch you if they want, but you need not see them. You simply say, “Here are the perimeters of our attention. If you prowl around under the windows till the the crickets go silent, we will pull the shades. If you wish us to suffer your envious curiosity, you must permit us not to notice it.” Anyone with one solid human bond is that smug, and it is the smugness as much as the comfort and safety that lonely people covet and admire.
But, as Ruth learns by the book's end: It is better to have nothing.
It's a painful journey here, and this novel feels like a combination of inspired brilliance and unfocused repetition.
I reveled in the beauty of Ms. Robinson's bold language (what a wordsmith!), but I also had moments of wishing that the editor had pulled tighter the strings of this story.
There was almost too much water here, and, at times I wanted a little fire.
Fire didn't happen here; even the house couldn't do more than smoke a bit when it was set to flames, but this town needed a little more heat, and so did the plot and the ending.
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 the U.S., though never properly clarified).
The water rises up to meet the locals in Fingerbone, rises up to pull down their houses and barns, but it's dangerous as it lies still and dark in the lake, too, pulling down the passengers of trains and boats into its depths and drowning them.
The sweet baptisms of Gilead are missing here, the power of water to restore us, renew us. This story does not provide images of tree branches laden with blossoms and dew, splashing lightly over the head of the protagonist as he brushes past.
This is a harsh landscape, filled with deep water, a dark place where children are abandoned and then raised by a drifter, a hoarder who's more comfortable under an overpass than in the confines of a proper home.
Within this bleak landscape, we meet two disenfranchised girls, Ruth and Lucille, sisters who conjured other literary sisters for me: the Dashwoods of Sense and Sensibility, the Bennets of Pride and Prejudice, the Chase sisters of The Blind Assassin, and the Blackwood sisters of Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle.
Ruth and Lucille have only each other, and they place their sisterhood above all other things, as they have nothing else:
Having a sister or a friend is like sitting at night in a lighted house. Those outside can watch you if they want, but you need not see them. You simply say, “Here are the perimeters of our attention. If you prowl around under the windows till the the crickets go silent, we will pull the shades. If you wish us to suffer your envious curiosity, you must permit us not to notice it.” Anyone with one solid human bond is that smug, and it is the smugness as much as the comfort and safety that lonely people covet and admire.
But, as Ruth learns by the book's end: It is better to have nothing.
It's a painful journey here, and this novel feels like a combination of inspired brilliance and unfocused repetition.
I reveled in the beauty of Ms. Robinson's bold language (what a wordsmith!), but I also had moments of wishing that the editor had pulled tighter the strings of this story.
There was almost too much water here, and, at times I wanted a little fire.
Fire didn't happen here; even the house couldn't do more than smoke a bit when it was set to flames, but this town needed a little more heat, and so did the plot and the ending.
February 17, 2013
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 being strict and conforming and never mentioning love. Of her daughters, Molly ministered to heathen, Helen ran away then came home and flew into the air. Sylvie, well Sylvie lived in her own world. In the next generation, Lucille decided to break the cycle.
But Ruth..."When did I become so unlike other people? Either it was when I followed Sylvie across the bridge, and the lake claimed us, or it was when my mother left me waiting for her, and established in me the habit of waiting and expectation which makes any present moment most significant for what it does not contain. Or it was at my conception."(p214) Thus begins the final pages of the story, some of the most beautiful writing I've ever experienced. I want to copy these last pages out here and read every day.
I had many passages marked for inclusion in this review, but I'm going to leave it with just the one above.
This will likely be forever one of my most favorite and moving reading experiences.
But Ruth..."When did I become so unlike other people? Either it was when I followed Sylvie across the bridge, and the lake claimed us, or it was when my mother left me waiting for her, and established in me the habit of waiting and expectation which makes any present moment most significant for what it does not contain. Or it was at my conception."(p214) Thus begins the final pages of the story, some of the most beautiful writing I've ever experienced. I want to copy these last pages out here and read every day.
I had many passages marked for inclusion in this review, but I'm going to leave it with just the one above.
This will likely be forever one of my most favorite and moving reading experiences.
April 4, 2024
La tetralogía que se inicia con Gilead me gustó tanto que parecía imposible que la mejor novela de la autora aun me estuviera esperando.
“Todo lo que se presenta ante el ojo es una aparición, un telón que baja sobre los verdaderos sucesos del mundo”Quizás en la comparación se vio favorecida por ser la última novela leída, aunque sorprendentemente fuera para la autora la primera que escribiera, o que con ella agotaba sus obras de ficción, no lo sé, el caso es que la encontré más bella, deslumbrante, triste y profunda que sus otras novelas, siendo todas ellas dignas acreedoras de tales calificativos. Quizás esperaba una especie de precuela de aquellas y quedé sorprendido por su ironía, hasta el título es irónico (también en su no fácilmente traducible título original, «Housekeeping») su poesía, sobre todo en esa forma especial y un tanto onírica que tiene la narradora de experimentar la vida, las cosas y personas que la rodean y, sobre todo, las cosas y personas ausentes, y que la religiosidad, tan esencial en su tetralogía, aquí no fuera más que un velo a través del cual miramos sin que el propio velo tome protagonismo expreso.
“… si Fingerbone era notable por algo, aparte de la soledad y los asesinatos, era por su fervor religioso, un fervor en su versión más rara y pura”Fingerbone es un pequeño pueblo perdido del medio oeste americano con un clima inhóspito en el que las casas sufrían frecuentes inundaciones y sus techos se veían amenazados cada año por las copiosas nevadas. La gente solía alardear de sus penurias porque tampoco había mucho más de lo que hablar. Todo lo inhabitual, personas y sucesos, todo lo que se saliera de “la replicación precisa de un día en el siguiente” era mirado con recelo, y los generalizados gestos y actitudes cristianos de sus gentes no eran más que una segunda piel adquirida por lo aprendido tan profundamente en los primeros años de la vida.
“… entre el lago y los ferrocarriles, entre las tormentas de nieve y las inundaciones, los incendios en los graneros y en el bosque, el fácil acceso a escopetas y trampas para osos, a licor casero y a dinamita, entre la omnipresencia de la soledad y la religión y los estragos y éxtasis que provocan ambas, por no mencionar la intimidad de las familias…, la violencia era inevitable”Ruth, la narradora de esta historia, y su hermana pequeña Lucille fueron dejadas por su madre en el porche de la casa que su abuela tenía en Fingerbone donde debían esperar su vuelta. A continuación, cogió el coche y se despeñó en el mismo lago sobre el que muchos años atrás se había caído el tren en el que viajaba su padre, el abuelo de las niñas.
“No puedo beber un vaso de agua sin recordar que el ojo del lago es el de mi abuelo, y que las aguas densas, ciegas y abrumadoras del lago moldearon las extremidades de mi madre, volvieron pesadas sus ropas, detuvieron su respiración y su vista”Ese abandono de su madre que desencadenó la inútil espera de “una llegada, una explicación, una disculpa”, moldeó el carácter de Ruth, la volvió distinta, peculiar, le “instiló la costumbre de la espera y la expectación que convierte cualquier momento presente en importante sólo por lo que todavía no contiene”. La llegada de su tía Sylvie, con un gran parecido con su madre, parecía una respuesta a esa espera.
“Anhelar y tener son tan similares como la cosa y su sombra... anhelar una mano sobre el cabello es casi sentirla… Así que, sea lo que sea lo que perdamos, el anhelo nos lo devuelve.”Después de que en una mañana de invierno la abuela “evitó despertarse” y de un breve periodo con sus asustadizas y cómicas tías Lily y Nona, las niñas quedaron al cuidado de su tía Sylvie. Sylvie había abandonado, al igual que sus dos hermanas, la casa familiar siendo muy joven y, tras un breve matrimonio, se dedicó a vagabundear sin rumbo (“todas las historias que contaba tenían que ver con un tren o una estación de autobuses”). Una vida que le confirió hábitos excéntricos, de esos que asustan a las gentes de Fingerbone y que les hace dudar de su capacidad para cuidar de las niñas. También Lucille desconfió y algo esencial se rompió entre las hermanas que, quién sabe, quizás representen los dos polos enfrentados en el alma de la propia autora.
“Lucille se empeñaría siempre… en darme un aspecto más decoroso y hacerme cruzar las amplias fronteras que nos separaban de es otro mundo, al que yo creía por entonces que nunca querría ir. Porque me parecía que nada de lo que ya había perdido, o pudiera perder todavía, podría encontrarse allí… me parecía que algo de lo que había perdido podía encontrarse en la casa de Sylvie… Sylvie, yo lo sabía, percibía la vida de lo que había perecido.”Maravillosa.
November 21, 2008
I picked up Housekeeping initially at an airport bookstore, but couldn't bring myself to pay the more than full price they were asking. It took me months to remember to order it, which I regret on several levels. Dark, oddly twisted, Robinson managed to suck me into this strange world. Housekeeping is a book that manages to haunt me still every time I see it on my shelf or think of it.
October 7, 2016
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 those within their own heads.
How much of who we are is in our DNA? Lucille and Ruthie are bereft of their mother through her suicide, they are raised by their grandmother, left to their two bumbling great-aunts and finally left to somehow find their way with their off-key aunt, Sylvie. Their problems are the same, but their reactions are worlds apart. Lucille sees in Sylvie a foreign creature and Ruthie sees a reflection of herself. There is isolation, abandonment, estrangement, and yearning; the desire to be a part of something and the need to be free.
The efforts Sylvie and Ruthie make to fit into the roles society declares they must fill are heartbreaking. There is a thread of sadness, melancholy and near helplessness that runs through the lilting prose. I found myself rooting for the underdogs and despairing of hope for them in the same breath.
If Marilynne Robinson had written only this novel, she would have cemented her place among the great writers of her time. She did more than this, however, and the body of her work has awed me. She waited 25 years between writing this book and her next, Gilead. I am hoping she will gift us with a few more before she ends her career.
How much of who we are is in our DNA? Lucille and Ruthie are bereft of their mother through her suicide, they are raised by their grandmother, left to their two bumbling great-aunts and finally left to somehow find their way with their off-key aunt, Sylvie. Their problems are the same, but their reactions are worlds apart. Lucille sees in Sylvie a foreign creature and Ruthie sees a reflection of herself. There is isolation, abandonment, estrangement, and yearning; the desire to be a part of something and the need to be free.
The efforts Sylvie and Ruthie make to fit into the roles society declares they must fill are heartbreaking. There is a thread of sadness, melancholy and near helplessness that runs through the lilting prose. I found myself rooting for the underdogs and despairing of hope for them in the same breath.
If Marilynne Robinson had written only this novel, she would have cemented her place among the great writers of her time. She did more than this, however, and the body of her work has awed me. She waited 25 years between writing this book and her next, Gilead. I am hoping she will gift us with a few more before she ends her career.
September 24, 2020
"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 indie lost in a shelf. A film that would've made you intensely cold in the (mostly vacant!) movie theater if you'd watched it there...
"Housekeeping" comes from this long tradition of literary accounts of very eccentric /antisocial/neurotic/depressive Aunts. It is a theme that has pervaded through lit history (from Great Expectations to Cider With Rosie, The Romantics, heck, even in Perks of Being a Wallflower!). It works well. But, like the protagonist in this very solid coming-of-age IDYLL, we too want, anticipate, covet for something to occur for once... for SOME great event to finally transpire...
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 indie lost in a shelf. A film that would've made you intensely cold in the (mostly vacant!) movie theater if you'd watched it there...
"Housekeeping" comes from this long tradition of literary accounts of very eccentric /antisocial/neurotic/depressive Aunts. It is a theme that has pervaded through lit history (from Great Expectations to Cider With Rosie, The Romantics, heck, even in Perks of Being a Wallflower!). It works well. But, like the protagonist in this very solid coming-of-age IDYLL, we too want, anticipate, covet for something to occur for once... for SOME great event to finally transpire...
November 9, 2020
This novel is probably one of the best examples I have come across in recent years on how to tell a tragic story without a single drop of melodrama. It should actually be taken as an example by all those authors out there trying (too hard) to make their readers feel like they just peeled and chopped a bunch of onions.
Housekeeping is a totally realistic story but because the writing takes it to a new level of brilliance I felt like it was all happening in a slightly different and much better world than ours; A world of subtlety.
Stunning writing, amazing characterisation and a haunting ending.
What’s here not to love?
A new (melancholy) favourite.
We are drifters. And once you have set your foot in that path it is hard to imagine another one.
Housekeeping is a totally realistic story but because the writing takes it to a new level of brilliance I felt like it was all happening in a slightly different and much better world than ours; A world of subtlety.
Stunning writing, amazing characterisation and a haunting ending.
What’s here not to love?
A new (melancholy) favourite.
We are drifters. And once you have set your foot in that path it is hard to imagine another one.
April 16, 2019
نیرویی که زمان را به حرکت در میآورد ماتمی است که از میان نمیرود. از این رو است که اولین اتفاق را هبوط میخوانند و امیدوارند که آخری، صلح باشد و رجعت. حافظه اینگونه ما را به جلو میبرد و پیشگویی پیامبران فقط حافظهای درخشان است؛ باغی خواهد بود که همهی ما به شکل یک کودک، در وجود مادرمان حوّا خواهیم خوابید و در حلقهی دندهها و زیر فشار مهرههایش خرد خواهیم شد
خانهداری برخلاف اسم گول زنندهاش، بیش از آنکه داستانی دربارهی خانه و خانواده باشد، روایت بیخانمانی و زوال یک خانواده و انزوای زنان آن است. شخصیتهای داستان کم و بیش در انزوایی بهسر میبرند که نیمی از آن تحمیلی و نیمی از آن خودخواستهست. روت، راوی بزرگسال داستان و بازماندهای از نسل سوم خانواده، خاطرههای دوران نوجوانیاش را نقل میکند: کمی از پدربزرگ و مادربزرگ، از مادری که دست به انتحار میزند، خواهری که از دست میدهد، از خالهای که محو شده و از خالهای دیگر (سیلوی) که حالا جای مادرش را گرفته. شروع داستان با ساختن خانهای بدست پدربزرگ شکل میگیرد و پایان آن با نابودیش بدست فرزند، و در این میان، آنچه در این خانه میگذرد داستان خانهداری را شکل میدهد
دریاچه به مثابهی طبیعت وحشی زنانه
بنظرم با داستانی چندلایه و تحلیلی روبرو هستیم. در وقایع کلیدی داستان، نقش دریاچه و آب بطور کلیتر، حسابی پررنگ بنظر میرسد. اگر میگویم نقش، دقیقا منظورم نقش به مفهوم کاراکتر است، جایگاه دریاچه در این داستان، هم ارز جایگاه آپارتمان در مستاجر رولان توپور است. دریاچه پدربزرگ را میبلعد و سالها بعد مادر خود را در آن غرق میکند و در میانهی داستان، سیل و طغیان دریاچه - مظهر باروری و زایش - خانه را تحت تاثیر قرار میدهد. پس از این ماجراها، پیوسته این سوال در ذهنم بود که ماجرا آبستن چه حادثهای است و دریاچهی کذایی قرار است چه بر سر روت، خواهرش لوسیل و خالهاش سیلوی بیاورد؟ گویا دریاچه به مثابهی طبیعت وحشی زنانه، مانند آهنربا پیوسته آنها را به سوی خود میکشاند. واکنش دو خواهر به زمزمههای دریاچه کاملا متفاوت است. لوسیل تسلیم عرف شده و اجازه میدهد زنانگی او توسط خانمی پیر، مقرراتی و منظم به بند کشیده شود. اما روت به راهنمایی سیلوی به امید دیدن کودکانی وحشی در سوی دیگر آب، با قایقی از دریاچه عبور میکند و در سفری یک روزه و شهودی، به مکاشفهای پنهان میرسد که باقی ماجرا و زندگیاش را کاملا تحتالشعاع قرار میدهد: ترک مدرسه، آتش زدن خانه و فرار با سیلوی از پل فراز دریاچه. با این تفاسیر، بیراه نیست اگر بگویم با کهنالگوی گذر از آب روبرو هستیم. آب مظهر حیات مادی و گذر از آب (تعمید) نشان از مرگ و تولدی دوباره - گذر از جهان کهن به عصری نوین - است. چنانچه در این داستان هم، روت بعد از عبور از دریاچه دیگر آن انسان سابق نیست و زندگیاش دچار تحولی بنیادین میشود
یک رمان کاملا زنانه
به دو دلیل خانهداری یک رمان کاملا زنانهست. به علت نخست در بالا اشارهای کوتاه کردم و علت دوم اینکه تمام داستان حول روابط زنان یک خاندان و احساسات و روحیهی زنانهی آنها و نقش محدود کنندهی مردان میچرخد: مادر بزرگ، سه خواهر و دو خواهرزاده. ورود و خروج سه شخصیت مردانهی داستان عجیب و در عین حال گویای مفهوم مهمی است: کاراکتر پدربزرگ در همان ابتدا با حادثهی قطار از داستان حذف میشود، مرد چکمهپوش و وحشی که در میانهی داستان و هنگامی که روت و سیلوی قصد گذر از رودخانه را دارند، ناسزا گویان از پی آنها میآید و سنگپرانی میکند و در آخر، کلانتر شکم بزرگ که برای مدت کوتاهی وارد داستان میشود و قصد دارد با محکوم کردن سیلوی و گرفتن سرپرستی روت، آن دو را از هم جدا کند. این شخصیتپردازیها یک طرح کلی را در ذهن تداعی میکند: نبرد نیروی تمامیتخواه مردانه علیه طبعیت وحشی و سرکش زنانه. در پایان داستان، دو خواهر که منشایی یکسان دارند در جایگاهی کاملا متقابل قرار میگیرند: لوسیل به تحصیلاتش ادامه داده و زندگی تعریفشدهای را در پیش می گیرد اما در اسارت و روت، بیخانمان با شغلهای موقت اما رها
عازم سفری شدم هزار فرسخی، بی هیچ ره توشه. می گفتند انکه بر این کمند عصا تکیه زده، در یکی مهتاب نیمه شبان به عدم پیوسته است. چون کلبه ی ویرانم را برکناره رودخانه ترک کردم، آوای باد سوز غریبی داشت. باشو سال 1684
پینوشت: تمام داستان یکطرف و لذت دو فصل پایانی یک طرف دیگر. تمثیلهای کتابمقدسی این فصل، مانند آوارگی قائن بعد از سرکشی و قتل هابیل، آوارگی نوح بر روی آبها و قدم گذاشتن مسیح بر دریاچه در دو فصل آخر کاملا بجا، زیبا و در ارتباط با پیرنگ داستان بود. در این فصل بود که تازه توانستم مفهوم کلی داستان را درک کنم
September 13, 2012
Until recently, I thought I would like to one day live in a hotel. Not a cheap, seedy places with the lingering smell of stale cigarette smoke where people go to have affairs, or not one of those ultra sleek and modern trendy boutique hotels, where they sell “sensual massage kits” with the minibar items, but one of those classically glamorous places, with a piano bar, that one’s grandparents would stay in, like the Waldorf Astoria or the Carlyle in New York. (Also, the fact that I’ve never found drug paraphernalia on the window sill at the Waldorf, is a plus.) But, after spending quite a bit of time in hotels in the past few years, I’ve found that they start to get to me after a while. They’re beautiful of course, but they’re cold and empty and impersonal. And as hard as I try to keep the room neat with the addition of my personal belongings, their presence seems foreign and out of place, and when contrasted with the plush surroundings, seeing my stuff in such perfect environs, makes the room seem squalid.
I found this book emulated the experience of staying in a hotel for too long. Housekeeping is about a doomed family. After the death of their grandmother, a pair of sisters is thrust into the care of their mentally unstable, transient aunt, that has an unfortunate penchant for hopping on freight trains and falling asleep on park benches. To me, generally, the plot is not really important. My focus is usually on the point source -- the means used to transmit a feeling or some sort of meaning. There was nothing about the conveyance of Robinson’s words that drew me in. I guess the kind of emotional blankness of the writing is supposed to act as a simulacrum of the remoteness of the main characters. (Duh, the book is told in the first person.) But, it was easy to forget the book was a first person narrative. There was such little insight into Ruthie’s internal life, that she became a complete non-entity. And maybe this was the point, but the intensity of her aloofness (and by her, I mean both Ruthie and Robinson), failed to impel any enthusiasm on my end.
The prose was often beautiful, even poetic -- but it left me cold. Sometimes there was so much literary showboating, that it often felt like I was reading an MFA thesis project. To wit, So shoes are worn and hassocks are sat upon and finally everything is left where it was and the spirit passed on, just as the wind in the orchard picks up the leaves from the ground as if there were no pleasure in the world but brown leaves, as if it would deck, clothe, flesh itself in flourishes of dusty brown apple leaves and then drop them all in a heap at the side of the house and goes on. Other times, I felt as if this novel was perhaps written with the aid of one of those magnetic poetry kits: So Fingerbone, or such relics of it as showed above the mirroring waters, seemed fragments of the quotidian held up to our wondering attention, offered somehow as proof of their own significance. This felt like words that were strung together, because they “sounded pretty,” or seemed “deep,” but for me, they failed to evoke any emotion or impression of profundity.
At some point while I was reading this, I thought “OK, this might be a three star book.” Despite my complaints, this book does have some positive attributes, (the aesthetics of the prose, chiefly). But then I stopped caring. And then I didn’t feel like reading it anymore. And then I just wanted to finish it, just so it would be over. And then I started to hate it. So, the process of writing this review, coupled with the resentment I accrued towards the second half when I no longer wanted to read it, has convinced me to rate at it two, which is consistent with my preference for being parsimonious with my affection.
I found this book emulated the experience of staying in a hotel for too long. Housekeeping is about a doomed family. After the death of their grandmother, a pair of sisters is thrust into the care of their mentally unstable, transient aunt, that has an unfortunate penchant for hopping on freight trains and falling asleep on park benches. To me, generally, the plot is not really important. My focus is usually on the point source -- the means used to transmit a feeling or some sort of meaning. There was nothing about the conveyance of Robinson’s words that drew me in. I guess the kind of emotional blankness of the writing is supposed to act as a simulacrum of the remoteness of the main characters. (Duh, the book is told in the first person.) But, it was easy to forget the book was a first person narrative. There was such little insight into Ruthie’s internal life, that she became a complete non-entity. And maybe this was the point, but the intensity of her aloofness (and by her, I mean both Ruthie and Robinson), failed to impel any enthusiasm on my end.
The prose was often beautiful, even poetic -- but it left me cold. Sometimes there was so much literary showboating, that it often felt like I was reading an MFA thesis project. To wit, So shoes are worn and hassocks are sat upon and finally everything is left where it was and the spirit passed on, just as the wind in the orchard picks up the leaves from the ground as if there were no pleasure in the world but brown leaves, as if it would deck, clothe, flesh itself in flourishes of dusty brown apple leaves and then drop them all in a heap at the side of the house and goes on. Other times, I felt as if this novel was perhaps written with the aid of one of those magnetic poetry kits: So Fingerbone, or such relics of it as showed above the mirroring waters, seemed fragments of the quotidian held up to our wondering attention, offered somehow as proof of their own significance. This felt like words that were strung together, because they “sounded pretty,” or seemed “deep,” but for me, they failed to evoke any emotion or impression of profundity.
At some point while I was reading this, I thought “OK, this might be a three star book.” Despite my complaints, this book does have some positive attributes, (the aesthetics of the prose, chiefly). But then I stopped caring. And then I didn’t feel like reading it anymore. And then I just wanted to finish it, just so it would be over. And then I started to hate it. So, the process of writing this review, coupled with the resentment I accrued towards the second half when I no longer wanted to read it, has convinced me to rate at it two, which is consistent with my preference for being parsimonious with my affection.
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February 23, 2020Another reviewer labeled this book as good for "Women who love descriptive writing." Well. I loved this book, so either I'm due for an identity crisis or someone here is a little misguided about writing and gender. Or both.
Either way, I can't say enough about this luminous, challenging and sobering book.
Robinson starts her novel with a cross-generational tale of loss. The narrator, Ruthie, recounts the story of the death of her grandfather, who went down with a train that sailed off of the bridge at the outskirts of their town and into a lake. She recounts the story of his children, her mother among them, who forever live in the shadow of his mysterious and surprising death, and then tells us of the day her mother left her and her sister at their grandmother's house and promptly drove her car off of the same bridge, into the same lake, in an act of suicide.
The rest of the novel concerns her and her sister's lives in the care of their grandmother, and when she dies, the care of their grandmother's sisters, and when they leave, the care of their mother's eccentric and wandering sister, Sylvie. It is this last relationship that dominates the novel, as the two young girls attempt to gain some sense of normalcy and stability under the care of a woman who has, herself, never had any sense of 'home' or anchor. It is about belonging to a world that continues to slip through one's fingers and not-belonging to the world at large.
This is a haunting, troubling work, its plot almost overridden by deeper questions of loss and transience and its pages filled to the brim with images of light and water -- those aspects of our lives that are forever fleeting and yet constantly present. Definitely worth re-reading.
Either way, I can't say enough about this luminous, challenging and sobering book.
Robinson starts her novel with a cross-generational tale of loss. The narrator, Ruthie, recounts the story of the death of her grandfather, who went down with a train that sailed off of the bridge at the outskirts of their town and into a lake. She recounts the story of his children, her mother among them, who forever live in the shadow of his mysterious and surprising death, and then tells us of the day her mother left her and her sister at their grandmother's house and promptly drove her car off of the same bridge, into the same lake, in an act of suicide.
The rest of the novel concerns her and her sister's lives in the care of their grandmother, and when she dies, the care of their grandmother's sisters, and when they leave, the care of their mother's eccentric and wandering sister, Sylvie. It is this last relationship that dominates the novel, as the two young girls attempt to gain some sense of normalcy and stability under the care of a woman who has, herself, never had any sense of 'home' or anchor. It is about belonging to a world that continues to slip through one's fingers and not-belonging to the world at large.
This is a haunting, troubling work, its plot almost overridden by deeper questions of loss and transience and its pages filled to the brim with images of light and water -- those aspects of our lives that are forever fleeting and yet constantly present. Definitely worth re-reading.
December 5, 2015
Look at that. And it’s not Versailles. It’s a brick wall with a ray of sunlight falling on it.
A summary of Marilynne Robinson's aesthetic in The Paris Review emphasises the ability of an artist to make us view the quotidian with a sense of wonder. It's what she does, it's what her characters experience, it imbues them and us with a sense of the numinous in everyday life.
I daresay there are people who will be allergic to this kind of writing, probably finding it dense and over-precious, but those will have deserted this book by page 19 anyway, in search of something with more energy and a touch of excitement. A plot of some kind. No?
No.
Stay with this one. Take it slow. Savour those magisterial cadences, that weighty portentous movement from earth to sky to wind and back to earth, to new life coming from the earth in potatoes smooth as eggs. Into water, the formless element that flows and covers and washes and seeps, the female element, the ominous lake that shimmers and thunders and groans, the flood waters that simmer and brim and absorb the contours of the world into swirling green-grey.
Those contours, the boundaries, they are essential here.
Well.
Emerson: "Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind."
Sylvie and Ruth achieve that integrity by inhabiting each other, by crossing the bridge, by becoming one with each other and the elements and nature and life and all humanity. Lucille is the one who cannot accept that her boundaries are overrun. She battles to assert her individuality through her clothes, her hair, her demarcation of difference within norms, her obsession with seeing herself as others will, standing outside herself and looking in.
Integrity: the state of being whole and undivided.
A summary of Marilynne Robinson's aesthetic in The Paris Review emphasises the ability of an artist to make us view the quotidian with a sense of wonder. It's what she does, it's what her characters experience, it imbues them and us with a sense of the numinous in everyday life.
One evening one summer she went out to the garden. The earth in the rows was light and soft as cinders, pale clay yellow, and the trees and plants were ripe, ordinary green and full of comfortable rustlings. And above the pale earth and bright trees the sky was the dark blue of ashes. As she knelt in the rows she heard the hollyhocks thump against the shed wall. She felt the hair lifted from her neck by a swift, watery wind, and she saw the trees fill with wind and heard their trunks creak like masts. She burrowed her hand under a potato plant and felt gingerly for the new potatoes in their dry net of roots, smooth as eggs. She put them in her apron and walked back to the house thinking What have I seen, what have I seen. The earth and the sky and the garden, not as they always are. And she saw her daughters' faces not as they always were, or as other people's were, and she was quiet and aloof and watchful, not to startle the strangeness away. She had never taught them to be kind to her.
I daresay there are people who will be allergic to this kind of writing, probably finding it dense and over-precious, but those will have deserted this book by page 19 anyway, in search of something with more energy and a touch of excitement. A plot of some kind. No?
No.
Stay with this one. Take it slow. Savour those magisterial cadences, that weighty portentous movement from earth to sky to wind and back to earth, to new life coming from the earth in potatoes smooth as eggs. Into water, the formless element that flows and covers and washes and seeps, the female element, the ominous lake that shimmers and thunders and groans, the flood waters that simmer and brim and absorb the contours of the world into swirling green-grey.
Those contours, the boundaries, they are essential here.
It was so dark that creatures came down to the water within a few feet of us. We could not see what they were. Lucille began to throw stones at them. "They're supposed to be able to smell us," she grumbled. For a while she sang "Mockingbird Hill," and then she sat down beside me in our ruined stronghold, never still, never accepting that all our human boundaries were overrun.Sylvie, too, loves the dark, loves sitting in the dark. There is a recurring image of the kind of isolation entailed in sitting in a lighted room or railway carriage at night. Windows offer not a view of the outside world, but a reflection of oneself, staring back. Those who are outside, at one with the dark, can see in, but those inside are blind to everything but that reflection of themselves.
Lucille would tell this story differently. She would say I fell asleep, but I did not. I simply let the darkness in the sky become coextensive with the darkness in my skull and bowels and bones.
"One thing we could do," Sylvie said. Her voice was low and exulting.
"What?"
"Cross the bridge."
"Walk."
"Dogs wouldn't dare follow, and nobody'd believe them anyway. Nobody's ever done that. Crossed the bridge. Not that anybody knows of."
Well.
Well.
Emerson: "Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind."
Sylvie and Ruth achieve that integrity by inhabiting each other, by crossing the bridge, by becoming one with each other and the elements and nature and life and all humanity. Lucille is the one who cannot accept that her boundaries are overrun. She battles to assert her individuality through her clothes, her hair, her demarcation of difference within norms, her obsession with seeing herself as others will, standing outside herself and looking in.
Integrity: the state of being whole and undivided.
March 29, 2024
I previously read Marilynne Robinson's four Gilead novels, and only now this Housekeeping, written 25 years earlier. That may be the wrong order, but still, this coming-of-age novel made a big impression on me. I definitely recognized the very balanced, refined writing style; Robinson is a first-class craftswoman who writes heavily charged sentences in a misleadingly poetic upmake. And I also recognized the emphasis on sensorial introspection: just as in the Gilead novels, the main character (here orphelin Ruth Foster) constantly alternates between registering her own sensory experiences and reflecting on what that does to her, and also constantly reflecting on the things she struggles with.
Here Robinson approaches what the naturalists and symbolists did in the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century; she focuses on the attirance and the threat posed by the environment in which this story takes place: the remote, chilly village of Fingerbone (the name alone), on a large lake in Idaho, connected with the outside world by a railway bridge that runs over the water. The tone is set right from the start: Ruth tells how her grandfather died when a train derailed on the bridge, ended up in the lake and was never recovered (and neither the bodies of the passengers within). And less than 20 pages later we read how her own mother committed suicide by driving her car off a cliff into the lake. The 'gothic flavor' of this novel is also emphasized further on, for example in an unparalleled nocturnal scene in which the house is half flooded; darkness and obscurity clearly are recurring themes in Robinson.
But the main body of this novel describes how Ruth, together with her sister Lucille, subsequently came under the care of her aunt Sylvie, a confused, chaotic and very dreamy character. Robinson writes quite emphatically: “it was the beginning of Sylvie's housekeeping”, and in doing so she immediately provides us with a key to reading this novel. After all, housekeeping is not only about the struggle to keep the house (literally), but also about keeping it 'in order', and by extension also one's own life. Looking back on it, you notice that all the characters in this novel struggle with this: getting a grip on their own lives, curbing the inherent chaos of life and steering it in the right direction, and what you have to give up and sacrifice in doing so, and whether such an orderly life is actually the right choice. And all that aggravated by the struggle with loss, grief, isolation and loneliness, especially as a woman or a girl.
In other words, through Ruth Foster's coming-of-age story, Robinson opens up a reflection on what this life is all about and whether it makes sense to control it. To be clear: she does not give simple, obvious answers, but above all - through Ruth - asks the right questions. And thus there is a link with the Gilead novels, which essentially deal with the same theme, but with a clear, more religious - read Calvinist - slant, in which the question of good and evil, damnation and grace are more central. I think that Robinson definitely shows even more mastery in some of those Gilead novels, both stylistically and substantively, but with this 'Housekeeping' she already showed that her novels are among the best of what has been written in recent decades, worldwide.
Rating 3.5 stars
Here Robinson approaches what the naturalists and symbolists did in the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century; she focuses on the attirance and the threat posed by the environment in which this story takes place: the remote, chilly village of Fingerbone (the name alone), on a large lake in Idaho, connected with the outside world by a railway bridge that runs over the water. The tone is set right from the start: Ruth tells how her grandfather died when a train derailed on the bridge, ended up in the lake and was never recovered (and neither the bodies of the passengers within). And less than 20 pages later we read how her own mother committed suicide by driving her car off a cliff into the lake. The 'gothic flavor' of this novel is also emphasized further on, for example in an unparalleled nocturnal scene in which the house is half flooded; darkness and obscurity clearly are recurring themes in Robinson.
But the main body of this novel describes how Ruth, together with her sister Lucille, subsequently came under the care of her aunt Sylvie, a confused, chaotic and very dreamy character. Robinson writes quite emphatically: “it was the beginning of Sylvie's housekeeping”, and in doing so she immediately provides us with a key to reading this novel. After all, housekeeping is not only about the struggle to keep the house (literally), but also about keeping it 'in order', and by extension also one's own life. Looking back on it, you notice that all the characters in this novel struggle with this: getting a grip on their own lives, curbing the inherent chaos of life and steering it in the right direction, and what you have to give up and sacrifice in doing so, and whether such an orderly life is actually the right choice. And all that aggravated by the struggle with loss, grief, isolation and loneliness, especially as a woman or a girl.
In other words, through Ruth Foster's coming-of-age story, Robinson opens up a reflection on what this life is all about and whether it makes sense to control it. To be clear: she does not give simple, obvious answers, but above all - through Ruth - asks the right questions. And thus there is a link with the Gilead novels, which essentially deal with the same theme, but with a clear, more religious - read Calvinist - slant, in which the question of good and evil, damnation and grace are more central. I think that Robinson definitely shows even more mastery in some of those Gilead novels, both stylistically and substantively, but with this 'Housekeeping' she already showed that her novels are among the best of what has been written in recent decades, worldwide.
Rating 3.5 stars
September 13, 2018
Marilynne Robinson shrugged and thought "Maybe I'll write a book" and then just did it, in longhand, and then she showed it to her friends who lost their minds, and one of them was an author whose agent pounced on it and she got a call, like, "This is brilliant, get ready to be famous," and she was like "Oh, okay."
She's compared to Melville. "I thought that if I could write a book that had only female characters that men understood and liked, then I had every right to like Moby-Dick," she says, and it's hard to find a piece about Robinson that doesn't mention Melville too. This is not because of her symbolism; although housekeeping is a symbol here, it doesn't have the smashing originality or unsubtlety that the Whale does. It's because it's about faith, which is alive and vital to Robinson the way it is to Melville. People who care this urgently are apt to sound radical about it:
The deep woods are as dark and stiff and as full of their own odors as the parlor of an old house. We would walk among those great legs, hearing the enthralled and incessant murmurings far above our heads, like children at a funeral.I wonder how many struggling would-be novelists have read those sentences and just given up. Hopefully enough. “Here’s a first novel that sounds as if the author has been treasuring it up all her life, waiting for it to form itself,” said the Times instantly. It was nominated for the Pulitzer. It was 25 years before Robinson felt like writing another book.
She's compared to Melville. "I thought that if I could write a book that had only female characters that men understood and liked, then I had every right to like Moby-Dick," she says, and it's hard to find a piece about Robinson that doesn't mention Melville too. This is not because of her symbolism; although housekeeping is a symbol here, it doesn't have the smashing originality or unsubtlety that the Whale does. It's because it's about faith, which is alive and vital to Robinson the way it is to Melville. People who care this urgently are apt to sound radical about it:
In the newness of the world God was a young man, and grew indignant over the slightest things. In the newness of the world God had perhaps not Himself realized the ramifications of certain of His laws, for example, that shock will spend itself in waves; that our images will mimic every gesture, and that shattered they will multiply and mimic every gesture ten, a hundred, or a thousand times.This isn't dogma; it's actual God, from a person who believes that the Bible is an actual thing. "It must mean something," Robinson says, "and I'm going to find out what." I'm an atheist, so I think the first statement is false, but I find her efforts awe-inspiring.
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