Cargando
Información sobre el libro
Housekeeping: A Novel
Escrito por Marilynne Robinson
Narrado por Becket Royce
Acciones del libro
Comenzar a escucharDescripción
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.
A Macmillan Audio production.
Acciones del libro
Comenzar a escucharInformación sobre el libro
Housekeeping: A Novel
Escrito por Marilynne Robinson
Narrado por Becket Royce
Descripción
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.
A Macmillan Audio production.
Acerca del autor
MR![]()
Reseñas
Just couldn't love it. Much of what happens remains opaque to me. Shame, I thought it was going to be a lost classic, but it was hard going and not especially rewarding.
Rating: 2I've not read anything by Marilynne Robinson, and I realised early on when reading Housekeeping that's she's an author whose prose cannot be rushed. Hurry your way through her writing and you'll miss the complete point of it - this is a book where the writing is a journey and not a destination.As such, I found Housekeeping to be not a particularly plot-driven book. The gist of the story is that two young girls find themselves living in a town that's more of a pass-through than a destination following the death of their mother. When their grandmother dies fairly soon too, an unknown aunt comes back to the town to take care of them. She's well-intentioned but a drifter at heart, who has become unused to the normalcy of living in a house and the usual rules of normal living that the the other townspeople adhere to. At its heart it's a book of the differing effects of loss and of the changing dynamics in family relationships over time. It raises the question of what really matters, whether living by the accepted standards of society is the necessary marker for love and responsible guardianship, or whether pure love without restrictions and expectations is the truest and most honest love of all.It's a book of subtlety rather than drama, and I'm a little torn by my overall impression of it. I enjoyed it, and certainly plan to get to Gilead at some point, but part of me wonders if it's a little too quiet overall. However, the more I think about it, the more I feel that the slow layers of this book are really rather brilliant, and that its quiet execution is precisely its genius lies.3.5 stars - enjoyable, but in a pondering rather than earth-shattering way.
Rating: 4Poetic and depressing. Not the sort of book I enjoy.
Rating: 3Atmospheric, full of dreamy descriptions, and a finalist for the Pulitzer. As young girls, Ruth and her sister are abandoned at their grandmother's house by their mother, Helen, who then drives her car off a cliff into the local lake. This is the same lake that took the life of Helen's father, who was aboard a train that drove off a local bridge into the water years earlier. The grandmother takes care of the sisters in a rather distant but caring way until she dies, and then two elderly great-aunts arrive and pick up where she left off. They don't quite know what to do with the girls either, and eventually they track down Helen's sister, Sylvie, to see if she will come and live with the girls. Sylvie is a tramp (of the train-hitching type), and while she does her best, she is very strange and brings the eyes of local officials on to their little family. Ruth is very much like Sylvie, ill at ease with the regular world, although sister Lucille makes every effort to be "normal". Not as engaging as Robinson's "Gilead", which I adored, but so well-written that the extensive descriptions and day-dreaming still pull the reader along to the, to me, surprising and satisfying conclusion. Highly recommended.
Rating: 4This novel is full of rich descriptions of setting with not much attention to plot or action. The language used is enjoyable, but slow.
Rating: 4An utterly compelling read, beautifully written: I want to say 'poetic', but I tend to abandon books of that description, and I loved this - so let's just say gorgeous prose.Narrator Ruthie describes life on the edge of a lake in Idaho. After a city upbringing with her mother, she and sister Lucille are dropped off with their grandma. Ultimately they find themselves cared for by unstable aunt Sylvie; the watery environs are a constant theme (floods; strange boat trips; thoughts of the two family members who lost their lives to the lake.) Meanwhile the dysfunctional family are at odds with society as Sylvie turns grandma's home into a hoarder's paradise and the girls play truant by the lake. Ultimately the exclusive friendship of the two erodes as Lucille seeks a conventional teenage life elsewhere, while Ruthie allies herself with Sylvie...It' a weird read; I read and enjoyed Robinson's 'Home' but this is a much more unusual and dreamy work. I can't imagine being able to write like this- it's fabulous!
Rating: 5Sisters Ruth and Lucille are dropped off at their grandmother's house just before their mother drives a car off a cliff into the lake. Ruth and Lucille stay in the house, first with their grandmother, then a couple of great aunts, then their mother's sister Sylvie. Sylvie is eccentric. She cares about Ruth and Lucille, but she is unconcerned with conventions. Eventually their idiosyncratic behavior brings unwanted attention from community leaders.Ruth narrates the story, which is much more than an account of what happened to her family. She has a philosopher's soul, and she makes observations about weighty things like boundaries, transience, being on the outside looking in versus being on the inside looking out, loneliness, death, the meaning of family, and the relationship between humans and the landscape. I listened to the audio version read by Becket Royce. At first I thought she spoke too fast, but I soon adjusted to her cadence. At some point, the narrator became Ruth, and the words flowed as effortlessly as thought.
Rating: 5I read this twice in two days; it's lovely; it's set in an Idaho town in the mountains and by a lake, unfathomably deep, which drowned grandfather (in a derailment) and mother (in a suicide). Both the town and the lake are called Fingerbone. Overpassing the lake are both a bridge and train tracks along the bridge. Ruth, who narrates, and Lucille, who's a year younger, are sisters; the book begins: "My name is Ruth. I grew up with my younger sister, Lucille, under the care of my grandmother, Mrs. Sylvia Foster, and when she died, of her sisters-in-law, Misses Lily and Nona Foster, and when they fled, of her daughter, Mrs. Sylvia Fisher." This opening indicates at the outset the shapeliness and equipoise of Robinson's sentences and, in omitting Helen--suicide and mother who cared for the girls longer and earlier than grandmother, great-aunts-in-law, or aunt--does not mislead.Water and air are everywhere. I mean both the elements--in Fingerbone--and the words--in the text. But of course they're everywhere anyway; people everywhere breathe air and drink water or they're dead. Light illuminates, too--Fingerbone--and how--and darkness enwraps; they're opposites; one or the other always obtains because physics. But water and air don't have opposites other than their absence, and they are never absent, not in Fingerbone.Cold too is everywhere because geography--latitude, altitude, lake--but Sylvie is impervious. Characters ask her again and again isn't she cold and she never is. Yet at the same time she always is: her imperviousness is not only to physical cold but also to emotional currents. Though she can be pleased and can laugh.She answers questions in letter but not spirit, technically logical but short of the point. "'Why are we staying here, Sylvie?' I asked." Here: in a boat under the bridge on the lake in the dark in the cold. "'Waiting for the train,' she said. If I had asked why we were waiting for the train she would have said, To see it, or she would have said, Why not, or, Since we are here anyway, we might as well watch it go by."There is a remoteness, too, to Ruth's narration. We hardly notice it, because it is of a piece with Robinson's prose style and Fingerbone's natural disposition: all that water, air, cold, light, and dark.These; and the bridge, the train, the lake: they loom. But Fingerbone--if a town is its people more than its natural disposition--is absent. Not even disregarded, simply unregarded, until the end, when it intrudes. Sylvie and Ruth and at first Lucille are insular and self-sufficient in their house on a hill on the edge of town set back from the main road. Lucille rebels midway through.She tries to take Ruth with her; but Ruth is Sylvie's, in the end. Before that, though: "Sylvie did not want to lose me," Ruth reflects. "She did not wish to remember me. She much preferred my simple, ordinary presence"; "if she lost me, I would become extraordinary by my vanishing."This is a lesson Lucille learns well; the book's last paragraph is a string of negatives that both affirm and deny. "No one watching this woman"--Lucille, the last sentence--"could know how her thoughts are thronged by our absence, or know how she does not watch, does not listen, does not wait, does not hope, and always for me and Sylvie." It is by their abandonment and absence, as much as by their clumsiness or cruelty, that family come to loom so large, and cast such long shadows.
Rating: 5A perfect, if depressing, novel
Rating: 5well written
Rating: 3This story was totally captivating until Chapter 8 when it became boring, redundant, and tedious withtoo many stories of "unsheltered" people going nowhere cluttering up Sylvie's random madness and Ruthie'sodd attraction to her.Although I've rarely been drawn to great conformity in housekeeping, the descent into filth, mold, and slothturned me into Susie Creamcheese and thankful that Lucille escaped.There was no reason given for why all this was okay with her sister, Ruthie.Yes, living in nature (Emerson would have LOVED the descriptions of leaves) can be great,but this house must have stunk and been crawling with rodents and vermin.The exploration on the island, the 6-8 hour days spent in the woods instead of at school,and the grueling and unnecessary boat trip just felt improbable - too many stretches toget to burning down Grandfather's old house, the point of which is never revealed.The real and best characters - those with an immense and unforgettable presence -are The Train, The Bridge, and The Lake, along with the under-appreciated Grandmotherwho was barely mourned or loved.
Rating: 32.5 stars rounded up.I didn't think this was as good as Gilead but the beauty of the prose was a redeeming feature. I guess I also "gave it some slack" knowing that this was her first book so I was more forgiving about some of the technical flaws in it.While the theme of being different, apart from the common standards and mores, is a big part of the book, I didn't see it as a book saying "we must strive toward a society where differences are valued." I thought that it was more about whether that loneliness which can come from being different drives one to conform (like Lucille) or to accept it and stand apart (like Sylvie and Ruthie). The difference between them can't be attributed to externals (in my opinion). However, as the book is purely from Ruth's point of view, we never know how Lucille is truly perceiving things.
Rating: 3Terrific book, beautifully written.
Rating: 5I recently read Housekeeping and Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle back-to-back never suspecting that they would have so many elements in common. First of all, there is the wonderful lyrical writing -- both Robinson and Jackson are full of vivid, precise descriptions of both nature and interiors. But more intriguing are the characters and plot. Each novel is told by a first person narrator, an adolescent girl, one of a pair of orphaned sisters. Their lives are circumscribed by their outsider status; they don't fit into the tight small town societies they find themselves in. In each story a close relative intrudes into the sisterly dyad, disrupting the harmony and closeness of the sisters.The end results of the disruptions are quite different for Ruth and Lucille in Housekeeping and Merricat and Constance in We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and each novel has its own distinct angle of vision. Robinson is exploring the ephemeral, and Jackson is more concerned with gothic possibilities. But the convergence of the two tales was wonderfully serendipitous. I highly recommend both books.
Rating: 5A heady, evocative novel. You feel the chill in the air, and hear the swish of the water beneath the character's feet as they scramble above the river. Perhaps - fortunately - I'm reading this book at the wrong phase of my life, but its themes of loss, home, rejection, failed to resonate with me. One to revisit, along with Robinson's other work.
Rating: 3Wow did I enjoy this book. Usually I find blurbs printed on covers completely useless, but Doris Lessing's on my copy ("I found myself reading slowly, then more slowly - this is not a novel to be hurried through, for every sentence is a delight") to be perfectly accurate. Another of those books that, once read, made me wonder why I had waited so long.
Rating: 4Beautiful prose.
Rating: 4Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping was an impulse read. I had not heard much of her or her work, but the cover was intriguing, and the reviews on the back of the book suggested it would be well-written. I am happy it found its way to me. For anyone who has ever felt abandoned, this book does a great job of explaining, in some depth, the varieties of feelings that can emerge as a reaction to being left behind. If you prefer fast-paced, plot-driven books, don't expect that from this one. It is a very introspective analysis of a few characters, as they work to understand their places in society and how to cope with the impermanence of the people around them. The language was beautiful, but at times required reading multiple times to fully grasp. In my reading, I felt a deep melancholy thread running throughout the entire narrative. This tone left me waiting for something terrible to happen. In the end, something that many readers may view as terrible does finally occur, but the book challenges the reader to examine whether this is indeed a negative outcome or if your narrow-minded expectations of people lead you to feel that way.
Rating: 4Pretty, surreal, sparse, vivid, honest, bittersweet - I'm going to be thinking about it for a while, but this book is a lot of good things.
Rating: 4I wonder if I would have rated Bill Clegg's Did You Ever Have a Family more highly had I not been reading it concurrently with Housekeeping. After listening to a few chapters of Clegg's book, I'd read a bit of Housekeeping and think, "This is how you write about loss and faith and memory." In retrospect, this seems an unfair comparison. I mean, they're both debut novels, both critically acclaimed, but I just love Robinson's book so much and her approach to loss and abandonment resonates so well for me that I fear Clegg's book didn't have a chance when I read them side-by-side.My favorite thing about Housekeeping is my favorite thing about all of Robinson's novels: she writes like I wish I wrote. "Sylvie stood up and stretched, and nodded at the sun, which was a small, white, wintery sun and stood askant the zenith although it was surely noon." (p. 152) I luxuriated in those words and in the same moment imagined the mundane way in which I would have described the position of the sun in the sky, and I felt something like despair. "...stood askant the zenith..." I felt reading that like I do when I look at a waterfall or the inside of a tulip or a sleeping child: a near-pain at such exquisite beauty.And see, even there I wanted to describe how I felt, and I wrote it too over the top. "Exquisite beauty" is not remotely as significant and meaningful as "...it was he who brought us here, to this bitter, moon-pulled lake, trailing us after him unborn." (p. 149)*sigh*Robinson, through Ruthie, describes the way that loss gives significance to that which otherwise would be commonplace. Ruthie explains how if her mother hadn't left she would have remained unremarkable. She would have been just "Mom," someone whom Ruthie would inevitably have found annoying or embarrassing, someone whom she tolerated as well as loved. Instead, the tiniest details of the last hours Ruthie was with her mother are alive and huge in Ruthie's memory.Of her relationship with her aunt Sylvie, Ruthie writes, "this was the measure of our intimacy, that she gave me almost no thought at all." (p. 195) I think about my two brothers, the one who died when I was very young and the one whose wedding I attended last year and how many more details I remember about the short life of the former than I do about the man-sized life of the latter. I think about how, if I don't think about it too hard, my children and even my spouse seem more like an extension of myself than they do like autonomous persons. They are to me sort of like my hand or my arm are to me: I have to make a conscious effort to notice them. I love them, but they are too close, too present to stand out in my awareness all of the time.Ruthie is also grappling with the effects of intentional and unintentional abandonment. "I was angry that she had left me for so long, and that she did not ask pardon or explain, and that by abandoning me she had assumed the power to bestow such a richness of grace." (p.161) By creating a void, the abandoner takes on the power to fill that void. She makes herself significant through her absence. Her mother's absence "established in me a habit of waiting and expectation which makes any present moment most significant for what it does not contain." (p. 214) This certainly made me reflect on my relationship with my children. Do I absent myself in small or large ways that create a need in them that only I can fill? And do I do this intentionally, albeit unconsciously, so that I can experience the significance and power of "bestowing such richness of grace"?A recurring image in the book is that of someone lost breaking into fragments so that she's no longer in one place, no longer one being with distinct boundaries. "And here we find our great affinity with water, for like reflections on water, our thoughts will suffer no changing shock, no permanent displacement. They mock us with their seeming slightness. If they were more substantial---if they had weight and took up space---they would sink or be carried away in the general flux. But they persist, outside the brisk and ruinous energies of the world. I think it must have been my mother's plan to rupture this bright surface, to sail beneath it into very blackness, but here she was, wherever my eyes fell, and behind my eyes, whole and in fragments, a thousand images of one gesture, never dispelled but rising always, inevitably, like a drowned woman." (p. 163)When we lose someone integral to our lives, memories of them scatter and overlay everything. They end up everywhere, a constant ache that can never be soothed.In addition to the big things, there are a few smaller quotes and images that I know will stick with me:p. 182: "If their good works supplied the lack of other diversions, they were good women all the same."p. 180: "...she considered accumulation to be the essence of housekeeping, and...she considered the hoarding of worthless things to be proof of a particularly scrupulous thrift." (puts decluttering in a different light)and my favorite:"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." (p. 154)And this is what I kept comparing Clegg's novel to. His novel had so many similar ideas, but in Housekeeping they just seemed more true in their messy, raw, metaphorical indirectness. Having made this error, I now know not to read any other novels alongside a novel by Marilynne Robinson. So close a proximity to her novels just leaves all others in the shadows.
Rating: 5Recommended to me by a friend. I can see why she did so--matches my housekeeping style :)At first this reminded me of Alice Hoffman books, which I enjoy, but this was much more a tale made of thoughts than of actions. By mid-book I was bothered by such philosophical ponderings by a supposedly young girl. Yes, this tale is told by her older self, but with continuously (I feel) projected interpretations of what she must have felt. Or maybe a 10(?) year old really wonders about life and death. Could be, her mother abandoned her with family, her grandma dies, her great-aunts can't deal with raising children, her aunt is continually perched on the verge of leaving. I forced myself to finish, but didn't enjoy it tho I did note some interesting quotes to save, e.g. thoughts about transience/homelessness vs the homebound mundane.The writing is very poetical, if you are the kind of person who can slow down enough to savor every sentence.
Rating: 3I think it is my favourite of all her books. There are times when you feel you may be lost in the words, the imagery is intense, poetic and profound, but shoulder on, because what is achieved in understanding is priceless.
Rating: 5Robinson’s novel is an extended meditation on the experiences of rootedness and transience, and it dwells on metaphors of instability: a train that escapes its tracks, a lake that overflows its boundaries, houses that threaten to fall down. The novel’s protagonists, Ruth and Lucille, as children passed from one guardian to the next, pay obsessive attention to facial expressions and subtle shifts of mood; they see everything as if for the last time. Though the book is ostensibly written from Ruth’s point of view, Ruth also tells her ancestors’ stories in meticulous detail, as if she experienced them herself, as if they were her own. Robinson invites readers to consider how much we are inescapably tied to, and shaped by, our families.
Rating: 4Two little girls were left tied to a porch, eating graham crackers, to wait for their grandmother’s return home while their mother drove herself into a glacial lake and drowned. From then on, these sisters are cared for by family members in very unusual manners and they learn how differently they are affected by their experiences. Issues of shared family ties, sociability, permanence, conformity, and mental stability create two very different young women who fulfill two very different sets of need. How are they each affected by loss? What are their breaking points? How do they perceive their pasts and futures? What is the end result?Reading this book took some time and occasional re-reading of passages to understand. Robinson sets a vivid scene, tells a story, and contemplates the workings of the mind. Water and the lake play major roles in this book. You’ll feel wet and cold much of the time – and you’ll feel the warmth of a heavy coat, too big, but still warm from the woman who shares it. As well as physical warmth, you will seek mental comfort…“What is thought, after all, what is dreaming, but swim and flow, and the images they seem to animate? The images are the worst of it. It would be terrible to stand outside in the dark and watch a woman in a lighted room studying her face in a window, and to throw a stone at her, shattering the glass, and then to watch the window knit itself up again and the bright bits of lip and throat and hair piece themselves seamlessly again into that unknown, indifferent woman. It would be terrible to see a shattered mirror heal to show a dreaming woman tucking up her hair. And here we find our great affinity with water, for like reflections on water our thoughts will suffer no changing shock, no permanent displacement.”An interesting and thoughtful read, I was somewhat surprised by the ending. For me, it was perfect. Excellent read. Recommended.
Rating: 4This is one of those books that make me wish I was back in school while reading it so that I could have that "Aha!" moment when someone explains everything that I'm obviously missing. Don't get me wrong, this is a beautifully written book, but maybe I just wasn't in the right frame of mind when I read it.Ruthie and her sister, Lucille, are left on their grandmother's doorstep in a small town when they are young, shortly before their mother drives off of a bridge into a lake -- the very same lake where Ruthie and Lucille's grandfather met his death when their mother was fifteen. Their grandmother raises them until she passes away, and when she does, her sisters-in-law are recruited to take care of the girls until their aunt, Sophie, can be located and become the girls' guardian. Sophie is a bit eccentric, and her behavior indicates that she's spent part of her life as a transient, living her life by the timetables of the trains. Both girls embrace Sophie at first, but Lucille eventually rebels and insists on 'proper' meals and habits and activities for the family -- eventually moving out -- while Ruthie is much more accepting of her aunt's different way of living.And really, that's about it. The plot meanders along, but at least it does so in a beautiful fashion."And any present moment was only thinking, and 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. Anyone that leans to look into a pool is the woman in the pool, anyone who looks into our eyes is the image in our eyes, and these things are true without argument, and so our thoughts reflect what passes before them."While it's not my cup of tea, I can see where this book would captivate those readers who will sit and appreciate the slow pace and gentle buildup and the evolution of Ruthie's character.
Rating: 3One of the best books I ever read. Suddenly becomes great somewhere in the middle with one of the best chapters I ever read about anything. It is print-version Chapter 8 (somewhere around 45 in this audio version).
Rating: 5
I fell in love with this book over 30 years ago when I was working on my English degree. I was thrilled to find it as an audiobook and enjoyed it just as much the second time. Robinson does such a wonderful job of getting the reader/listener absorbed into the unique world of the main characters that it’s difficult to leave them behind at the end.
Rating: 5This was one of the most surreal novels I've read. Robinson has a very dreamy narrative style. At times it can be soothing, other times disorienting. The story line itself was interesting and the characters were well developed, I thought. Overall this was good, but I much preferred Robinson's other book Gilead .
Rating: 3This is one of those books that make me wish I was back in school while reading it so that I could have that "Aha!" moment when someone explains everything that I'm obviously missing. Don't get me wrong, this is a beautifully written book, but maybe I just wasn't in the right frame of mind when I read it.Ruthie and her sister, Lucille, are left on their grandmother's doorstep in a small town when they are young, shortly before their mother drives off of a bridge into a lake -- the very same lake where Ruthie and Lucille's grandfather met his death when their mother was fifteen. Their grandmother raises them until she passes away, and when she does, her sisters-in-law are recruited to take care of the girls until their aunt, Sophie, can be located and become the girls' guardian. Sophie is a bit eccentric, and her behavior indicates that she's spent part of her life as a transient, living her life by the timetables of the trains. Both girls embrace Sophie at first, but Lucille eventually rebels and insists on 'proper' meals and habits and activities for the family -- eventually moving out -- while Ruthie is much more accepting of her aunt's different way of living.And really, that's about it. The plot meanders along, but at least it does so in a beautiful fashion."And any present moment was only thinking, and 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. Anyone that leans to look into a pool is the woman in the pool, anyone who looks into our eyes is the image in our eyes, and these things are true without argument, and so our thoughts reflect what passes before them."While it's not my cup of tea, I can see where this book would captivate those readers who will sit and appreciate the slow pace and gentle buildup and the evolution of Ruthie's character.
Rating: 3Marilynne Robinson's first novel explores the boundaries of family, loss, connection, transience, meaning, and memory. What? All that in just over 200 pages? Well, yes, and she does so beautifully. Ruthie and Lucille are sisters who grow up in an isolated town in the far west (late in the book, we decide they are in Idaho), the last descendants in a family storied by suicide and other dramatic forms of death. Orphaned, they are raised first by their grandmother, then by two comic maiden aunts, and finally by their own aunt, Sylvie, who leaves her independent life on the rails to take up housekeeping with them. That transient life is not so easily left behind, though; Ruth and Lucille each respond to Sylvie's rootlessness in her own way, providing the narrative arc for Robinson's exquisite novel. In the end, Ruth tells us that Sylvie "...cast about constantly for ways to conform our lives to the expectations of others, or to what she guessed their expectations might be, and she was full of purpose, which sometimes seemed like hope." Her success, of course, is less than complete. Robinson's novel is also about the experience of being on the outside looking in (she repeatedly uses the image of a person looking into or out of a window from the lit side, noting how one only sees one's reflection from that perspective, and is left to imagine what is on the other side), and the assumptions we make about those who live solitary lives outside the apparent security of family, town, and society. Truly, our projection of loneliness and discomfort may bely our own fear of loss and disconnection; our compassionate or pitying provision of staples a way to buffer ourselves from terror. "Why should they all feel judgment in the fact that these nameless souls looked into their lighted windows without envy and took the best of suppers as no more than their meager due?" And, of course, there is the notion that all our lives are transient, regardless of how rooted we believe them to be. "That most moments were substantially the same did not detract at all from the possibility that the next moment might be utterly different. And so the ordinary demanded unblinking attention. Any tedious hour might be the last of its kind." This novel is poetry in prose form. And, as is true (for me) with most poetry, I know I missed much of it. Still, I savored and got completely lost in the language and the story. Housekeeping falls just barely short enough of perfect to miss the full five stars of my rating scheme.
Rating: 5