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Original Essays | October 18, 2009

Victoria Hislop: IMG From Leprosy to Lorca — Strange Inspiration



My first novel, The Island, was inspired by a chance visit to a tiny island leper colony off the coast of Greece on our summer holiday. It was a... Continue »
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    The Return

    Victoria Hislop

Housekeeping

by Marilynne Robinson

Housekeeping Cover

Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments:

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.

Review:

"So precise, so distilled, so beautiful that one doesn't want to miss any pleasure it might yield." Le Anne Schreiber, The New York Times Book Review

Review:

"Here's a first novel that sounds as if the author has been treasuring it up all her life...You can feel in the book a gathering voluptuous release of confidence, a delighted surprise at the unexpected capacities of language, a close, careful fondness for people that we thought only saints felt." Anatole Broyard, The New York Times

Review:

"I found myself reading slowly, then more slowly — this is not a novel to be hurried through, for every sentence is a delight." Doris Lessing

Review:

"An often comic novel that has become a certifiable classic. Her name is Ruth and she has the eye and ear of a poet." Hamill, Hungry Mind Review

Review:

"....The language is so precise, so distilled and so beautiful one does not want to miss any pleasure it might yield up to patience." Charles McGrath. The New York Times Books of the Century

Review:

"I found myself reading slowly, than more slowly — this is not a novel to be hurried through, for every sentence is a delight." Doris Lessing

Synopsis:

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.

About the Author

Marilynne Robinson is the author of the novel Gilead and two books of nonfiction, Mother Country and The Death of Adam. She teaches at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop.

What Our Readers Are Saying

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Average customer rating based on 4 comments:
OneMansView, January 30, 2009 (view all comments by OneMansView)
Which predominates: overwritten tedium or brilliance? (3.5 *s)

This is a book that is flooded with descriptions, imagery, and contemplation that can, from sentence to sentence, seem odd, difficult, and overwritten and then insightful, lyrical, and poetic. The central character is Sylvie, a thirty-something female, who has returned to Fingerbone, an obscure western town set on a large lake, to care for her two nieces who have lost both their grandmother and mother. The story is told from the standpoint of Ruthie, one of the girls.

A heavy cloud hands over the entire book as death, impermanence, the power of water and the wind, cold weather, forests, mud, deprivation, and the like are constants in this rather gloomy story. It is a formidable environment that Sylvie and Ruthie, largely unsuccessfully, attempt to navigate, including social expectations and illusions. Despite an unspecified life of trouble, there is a strength and resoluteness to Sylvie that resonates.

The plot is minimal. The characters serve as a means for the author to develop her themes. The book is difficult and tedious with digressions interlaced throughout, not to mention getting past the author’s obscure word choices, yet there is brilliance on most every page.
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P R, January 5, 2009 (view all comments by P R)
Marilynne Robinson's "Housekeeping" should be savored like fine wine- drink it in slowly to appreciate the nuances. Like all other prose-poetry, it not just about the story, it is also about the language that tells the story. This fine little book is filled with rich images and bone-achingly sad lives that are filled with possibilities.
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(10 of 16 readers found this comment helpful)
kat, September 17, 2007 (view all comments by kat)
Through the coming-of-age reflections of the narrator, Ruthie, Marilynne Robinson explores the idea that family never dies. Instead of the usual skeletons in the closet, however, Ruthie’s dead family members are more like ghosts that not only haunt the nearby lake, but also leave bits of their memory and even themselves in living relatives. While Robinson’s main characters are “outsiders” and “transients,” she constructs their motives and personalities so well that one cannot help but understand that their choices are fated as surely as the blood that runs through their veins.
A reviewer called Housekeeping a “modern-day classic” and I have to agree in that wading through her long, complicated sentences was reminiscent of high school required reading. But I hasten to add that this is not a bad thing. As with the reading of most classics, the occasionally necessary re-reading of paragraphs and the slower pace of processing needed to fully ingest the author’s craft was, unequivocally, worth it.
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Product Details

ISBN:
9780312424091
Author:
Robinson, Marilynne
Publisher:
Picador USA
Subject:
General
Subject:
General Fiction
Subject:
Literary
Edition Description:
Us and Revised
Publication Date:
November 2004
Binding:
Paperback
Language:
English
Pages:
224
Dimensions:
8.40x5.52x.57 in. .43 lbs.

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