Housekeeping

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. maril [...]

I was craving a book like thishad 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 - [...]

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 [...]

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” (nytimes/ref/books/fict), and the high ratings from friends with impeccable taste. [...]

Two things you should know about my thoughts on Housekeeping:1) I thinkHousekeepingis a great book.2) FinishingHousekeepinggave me a palpable sense of relief. Housekeepingis darker and more intense than the author’s better-knownGilead . 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 [...]

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 [...]

“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 betwee [...]

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, [...]

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.

"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 [...]

Another 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 brid [...]

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. 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 [...]

I finished this book last week and have been traveling through its landscape ever since, much like Sylvie rode her railcars from town to town. Marilynne Robinson creates characters that beg you to live with them, to dig deep and touch their souls. They are unlike any people you have ever known, and yet they are every person you have ever met. They struggle with how to connect to one another and how to suffer the loneliness of the connections they cannot make. The worlds that are most real are th [...]

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. One evening one summer she went out to the garden. The earth in the rows was light and soft as cinders, pale clay yellow, [...]

‭Housekeeping ,c1980, Marilynne Robinsonعنوان: خانه داری (رمان)؛ نویسنده: مریلین رابینسون؛ مترجم: مرجان محمدی؛ تهران، آموت، 1393، در 272 ص، شابک: 9786006605395؛ نخستین رمان بانو مریلین رابینسون همین کتاب است، پشت جلد کتاب: برنده‌ ی جایزه کتاب ملی 2008؛ برنده اورنج طلایی انگلیس 2009؛ نامزد جایزه ایمپک دوبلی� [...]

"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. Boredom. Languid Days. School Days. Insufferable cold. StasisLike some passable 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 90's indie l [...]

LA RAGAZZA DEL LAGOPur 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 personaggio importante della narrazione, così come nel film, e nella serie tv che da quello è stata tratta. 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 v [...]

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 nev [...]

When she remembered that we were there and that we were children she sometimes tried to make her stories useful.This is a highly regarded and much accredited piece, judging by the lists and the prizes and the place among the few females on many a personal favorite and/or grudgingly obliged pedestal. This is also a target of the Emperor's Clothing logos, judging from the MFA appraisals and sentence length critiques and the usual waving about a book like a dog worrying at tissue and string. I'll t [...]

Marilynne Robinson won great praise a couple years ago for "Gilead," and much was made of the fact that it had been 23 years since she had written her first novel, "Housekeeping." While this was an evocative tale about a family in an isolated rural area and the writing was often poetic, I found it a struggle to get through. Heavy on atmospherics and light on plot, it was the kind of book where I often found myself nodding off on mid-page. Not my cup of tea.

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." 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 murmuring [...]

Housekeeping has a distancing voice--brittle, isolationist and isolating--and the book is steeped in both death and its premonition, life seen as an unforgiving and unforgiveable thing tolerable only in ritualization or complete letting go.Somehow, though, it remains also one of most humane and often even humorous books I know, still gentle in its ironies, humane and sympathetic in its treatment of the women and girls who make up the whole of the book, all of them suicides or suicides waiting to [...]

This is a book that I will read again. Although the story is sad and tragic, the writing is just exquisite. It’s hard to believe that this is Robinson’s first novel. I had an immediate connection to the story. Losing a loved one to suicide is not easy.

Dell’esser vagabondiDopo questo, il silenzio. Questo ho pensato dopo aver letto le ultime righe di Le cure domestiche. Cos’altro può aver da dire una scrittrice dopo essersi messa così a nudo? Dopo aver indicato con precisione il filo dei suoi pensieri, delle sue emozioni, delle sue vergogne? Dopo aver raggiunto tali livelli di intimità con se stessa e conoscenza della sua anima? Cosa resta? Eppure Marillynne Robinson (1943), dopo questo romanzo del 1980, scrive ancora Gilead nel 2008, Ca [...]

Every episode represented a world of longing, so utterly beautifull. Longing to be like the others (Lucille), longing to being loved (Ruthie) and longing to a world of transcience and dwelling (Sylvie). On some places the longings meet each other while sometimes they collide. But the result is a magnificent novel about major feelings in one's life, all told in this slow, 'perceptive', strong language.

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 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 peop [...]

Perhaps in future generations when the American-MFA style of programme fiction writing comes to a grinding and welcomed halt, and as critics look back upon this period of American literature and wonder from when did it all begin, they might pluck from the threads of the post-war era. Although MFA programmes have been a long part of the establishment, it's only relatively recently - say in the last few decades - where the popularly and uptake of such programs have turned it into an almost blister [...]

Perdita, solitudine, senso di appartenenza, ricordo… Memoria."C'è così poco da ricordare di ciascuno, un aneddoto, una conversazione a tavola. Ma a ogni ricordo si ritorna più e più volte, e ogni parola, per quanto casuale, si iscrive nel cuore, nella speranza che il ricordo si attui un giorno, e diventi carne, e che i vagabondi trovino una strada verso casa, e che i morti, di cui sentiamo sempre la mancanza, passino finalmente attraverso la porta e ci accarezzino i capelli con affetto sog [...]

Honestly, I can recommend 'Housekeeping' only to readers of experimental literature and to budding new writers and students of MFA programs. And to the curious wilders and primitive self-taught readers of literature like me. It is a book of gloriously lyrical language, but it is also dense with description and atmosphere and no real action. Days pass, seasons pass, but time has stopped, nonetheless.Water and dead tree leaves are among the things at effortless rest in the world, almost like dande [...]

A lachrymose and mournful atmosphere pervades the town of Fingerbone in which 'Housekeeping' is set; Fingerbone is a town of foggy, opalescent mornings, hazy pink sunsets, of pale moon-light reflecting on the glacial lake, a town of ethereal beauty in which the lives of two sisters, Ruthie and Lucille and their eccentric aunt Sylvie play out. In many ways their lives are reflective of Fingerbone itself; insignificant and seemingly irrelevant, yet teeming with a hidden life and beauty.The quiesce [...]