Reviews

Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson

helenmeigs's review against another edition

3.0

Hmmmmm I pushed through this one out of loyalty to Marilynne Robinson but didn’t love it… i think partly cause it’s freezing most of the book and it’s decidedly summer right now. I think I could’ve loved it in another mood

dregina's review against another edition

challenging dark emotional slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

ncat999's review against another edition

5.0

This book is not for everyone due to its slow-moving plot and meandering style, but I loved it. It's the sort of book that doesn't necessarily compel you to read it when you're not, but while you are, you're completely swept up in its language and its world, and it's difficult to put down.

It's a quietly and deeply sad book, but not in a loud or horribly tragic way. Robinson uses the power of place, atmosphere, and weather to brilliantly conjure the mood. The sometimes intensely poetic prose requires your attention, and much would be lost by rushing through it. Take your time and savor it.

passanteltarek2's review against another edition

3.0

3.5*

carmenx9's review against another edition

challenging emotional reflective sad medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

Feeling painfully seen in this one, seeing the magic and confusion of that odd brand of family unique to rural America - especially those outdoor childhoods - echoed back at you is a trip, especially through Robinson's words veering between the abstract and realistic. Hugely recommended

skmcclelland's review against another edition

3.0

I read this book too quickly. I assumed that since it was short, I could plow through it in a couple of days and be good to go for book group. Not so, which I should have remembered from reading [book:Gilead], an absolutely gorgeous book. This one might have been gorgeous too, I can't in any fairness say. I didn't have the time (or the mental capacity, honestly) to linger over the passages the way one needs to in order to fully appreciate it. Her language is poetry that I had to chew up like fast food, much to my own loss, I think.

That being said, I'm not sure if I will like it when I re-read it in about ten years when I have more time (yeah, uh-huh, sure!) because it's a pretty depressing story with characters who I'm not sure are entirely likeable. GILEAD was full of redemption and hope and human flaw. This one is just...weird and rather disturbed. I hope I will like it. I hope that the power of the language will draw me into the plot and into these characters in a way that a rushed reading didn't allow.

azimhol's review against another edition

Wet, transient, melancholy, and just not for me.

novabird's review against another edition

5.0

“Housekeeping,” touches on the upkeep of a domicile but more so delves into balancing the weights of the psyche, and into the ideas of isolation and connection. If the house roofs the body then the body shelters the psyche/soul. This reminds me of Marilynn Robinson’s avowed Christian faith and I can see the Biblical reference from where she draws this idea: (not that I share her religious faith)

1 Corinthians 6:19-20 New International Version (NIV)
“19 Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; 20 you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your bodies.”

Yet Robinson’s Christianity is also strongly influenced by humanism of Thoreau. Her intermingling of interior intimacies with connection to the land is amazingly well illustrated in a voice that is both wondrous and keenly intuitive. Marilynne Robinson once told an interviewer that she thought that Henry David Thoreau's Walden could be called Housekeeping.

Within three generations of women, Housekeeping turns from the interior confines of shelter and from the strictures placed upon women to keep a standard of housekeeping and behaviors that stay within accepted social practices. Housekeeping turns toward the embracing of wild open spaces unfettered by human constraints that Ruth, her sister, Lucille, while she is still unchanged, and in the unconventional yet steady presence of Sylvie, Ruth’s aunt experience in commune with nature.

FROM 

TO 

“Thus finely did our house become attuned to the orchard and to the particularities of weather, even in the first days of Sylvie’s housekeeping. Thus did she begin by littles and perhaps unawares to ready it for wasps and bats and barn swallows.”

Robinson describes waves on the lake, as slapping among the girders under a bridge, as "insistent, intimate, insinuating, proprietary as rodents in a dark house" The logic of this has become entirely psychological, reflecting Ruth's habit of conflating the domestic interior with the wilderness that surrounds her house. Elsewhere in the novel, for instance, "the deep woods are as dark and stiff and full of their own odors as the parlor of an old house". http://www.theguardian.com/books/2005...

Spoiler

“Now truly we were cast out to wander, and there would be an end to housekeeping.”

In “Housekeeping,” I see two themes that stand out for me: 1. The symbolism of water 2. the idea of inheritance of sadness and sorrow.

1. Water symbolizes strength and time = longevity

It was as if she righted herself continually against some current that never ceased to pull. She swayed continuously, like a thing in the water, and it was graceful, a slow dance, a sad and heavy dance.

This passage opens up the struggle and tension apparent in the ebb and flood of society's expected long-lived/traditional norms on women.

Water also harbors memory:

“Such currents pull one’s dreams after them, and one’s own dread is always mirrored upon the dread that inheres in things.”

And water encapsulates the power of transformation:

“I dreamed that Sylvie was teaching me to walk under water. To move so slowly needed patience and grace, but she pulled me after her in the slowest of waltz, and our clothes flew like robes of painted angels.”

2. With the idea of inheritance of sadness and sorrow:
Robinson reaffirms colloquial folklore that says, ‘You are just like your father,’ and inherently expands on this:

“She’s like another sister to me. She’s her mother all over again.”

Robinson states the natural consequences of loss and how it innately lingers:

Sylvie said, “She should be sad.” She laughed. “I don’t mean she should be, but, you know, who wouldn’t be?”

Robinson presages how we have discovered the rootedness of personality traits and behaviors and through the mythopoeic lens traces it back to the newness of the world:

“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, or a thousand times. Cain, the image of God, gave the simple earth of the field a voice and a sorrow, and God Himself heard the voice, and grieved for the sorrow, so Cain was creator, in the image of hi Creator. God troubled the waters where He saw His Face and Cain became his children and their children and theirs, through a thousand generations, and all of them transients, and wherever they went everyone remembered that there had been a second creation, that the earth ran with blood and sang with sorrow. And let God purge this wicked sadness away with a flood, and let the waters recede to pools and ponds and ditches, and let every one of them mirror heaven. Still they taste a bit of blood and hair.”

Put simply, Robinson says that sorrow is in our blood and that there is no complete cleansing from this.

Spoiler

Yet, Ruth finds a way to mediate her sorrow when she falls in step with another version of her mother, found in her Aunt Sylvie who has made peace with the world despite not quite fitting in:

“Finally, Sylvie was in front of me, and I put my hands in my pockets, and tilted my head, and strode, as she did, and it was as if I were her shadow, and moved after her only because she moved and not because I willed this pace, this pocketing of the hands, this tilt of head. Following her required neither will nor effort. I did it in my sleep.”

At the right time, Aunt Sylvie initiates Ruth by abandoning her for a day and inoculates Ruth against her own darker thoughts:

-“’There is nothing to be afraid of,’ she said. ‘Nothing to be worried about. Nothing at all.’”
-“Do you want to go home?”

Sylvie motherly like comforts Ruth, rocks her and says soothing words. Ruth relaxes not only into accepting Sylvie as a mother, but eases herself into an easier state of grace of being:

“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.”

Ruth recognizes Sylvie’s love and is made better by it, because in her love Ruth can see herself better. Ruth knows that to find her way in the world, she need not become a house onto itself and full of ego and weight of societal constructs and she need not simply vanish into a vaporous unity of oneness in all. Sylvie’s love anchors Ruth to her human condition and helps Ruth accommodate her own need to find a personal balance.

“Sylvie did not want to lose me. She did not want me to grow gigantic and multiple, so that I seemed to fill the whole house, and she did not wish me to turn subtle and miscible, so that I could pass through the membranes separating dream and dream.”

Ruth and Sylvie become a family of two.

“Families will not be broken. Curse and expel them, send their children wandering, drown them in floods and fires, and old women will make songs of all these sorrows and sit on the porch and sing them on mild evenings.”

The two women find the sweet grace of finding a place in a cold world when they both recognize the universal songs of sorrow.

Of three generations of women, Ruth the youngest is the fully actualized, reliable narrator, that discerningly looks back, ‘and seven years passed,’ on her place in the world and how she came to be according to societal standards an outsider, a transient or in words of today ‘homeless.’ Yet Ruth would never use those words, she would probably say something like a wanderer or traveler, as she is comfortable in the world of her own making. In fact, she sees the importance of gathering words and telling the story to restore words again into a conciliated landscape of place:

“It never occurred to me that words, too, must be salvaged, though when I thought about it, it seemed obvious. It was absurd to think that things were held in places, are held in place, by a web of words.”

Housekeeping is a truly remarkable book that looks at how women construct their identities, when they self-identify as being different from other people. Robinson’s world view as a, “Place for all,” is a testament to the inherent worth and dignity of each person, and it places chosen homelessness in a new light.

Highly recommended. 5+

Other passages I especially liked/loved:

“She had known a thousand ways to circle them all around with what must have seemed like grace. She knew a thousand songs.”

“Sometimes they cried out at night, small thin cries that never woke them. The sound would stop as she started up the stairs, however softly, and when she reached their rooms she would find them all quietly asleep, the source of the cry hiding in the silence, like a cricket. Just her coming was enough to still the creature.”

“In fact, she was often prompted or restrained by the thought of saving this unconsciousness of theirs.”

“She was as constant as daylight, and she would be as unremarked as daylight, just to watch the calm inwardness of their faces.”

“He conserved syllables as if to conserve breath.”

“Though she seemed abstracted, I think that like one dreaming, she felt more than the urgency of present business, her attention heightened and at the same time baffled by the awareness that this present had already passed.”

“It is, as she said, difficult to describe someone, since memories are by their natures fragmented, isolated and arbitrary as glimpses one has at night through lighted windows.”

“So at the end of three days the houses and hutches and barns and sheds of Fingerbone were like so many spilled and foundered arks.”

“So Fingerbone, or such relics of it as showed above the mirroring waters, seemed fragmnets of the quotidian held up to our wondering attention, offered somehow as proof of their own insignificance.”

“In such weather one steps on fossils. The snow is too slight to conceal the ribs and welts, the hollows and sockets of the earth, fixed in its extreme. But in the mountains the earth is most ceremoniously buried, with all its relics”

“I was always reminded of pictures, images, in places where images never were, in marble, in the blue net of veins at my wrist, in the pearled walls of seashells.”
“What are all those fragments for, if not to be knit up finally?”

“Lucille saw in everything its potential for invidious change.”

“Perhaps we all awaited a resurrection.”

“We would walk among those great legs, hearing the enthralled and incessant murmurings far above our heads, like children at a funeral.”

“There were other things that bothered Lucille about Sylvie’s housekeeping.”

“They were both women like me, and nerves like theirs walk my legs and gesture my hands.”

“The sky above Fingerbone was a floral yellow. A few spindled clouds smoldered and glowed a most unfiery pink. And then the sun flung a long shaft over the mountain, and another like along-legged insect bracing itself out of its chrysalis, and then it showed above the black crest, bristly and red and improbable. In an hour it would be the ordinary sun, spreading modest and impersonal light on an ordinary world, and that thought relieved me.”

“Dawn and its excesses always reminded me of heaven, a place where I have always known I would not be comfortable.”

“For need can blossom into all the compensations it requires.”

“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.”

“What is thought, after all, what is dreaming, but swim and flow, and the image they seem to animate?”

“For in the case of such pure sorrow, who can distinguish mine from thine?”

“Sylvie only kept them, I think, because she considered accumulation to be the essence of housekeeping.”

“For if Fingerbone was remarkable for anything besides loneliness and murder, it was for religious zeal of the purest and rarest kind.”

“Like a soul released, I would find here only the images and simulacra of the things needed to sustain me.”

“Every sorrow suggests a thousand songs and every song recalls a thousand sorrows, and so they are infinite in number, and all the same.”

"If she would have ‘come back for our sakes.’ She would have remained untransfigured. But she left us and broke the family and the sorrow was released and we saw its wings and saw it fly a thousand ways into the hills, and sometimes I think sorrow is a predatory thing because birds scream at dawn with a marvelous terror, and there is, as I have said before, a deathly bitterness in the smell of ponds and ditches.”

“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 my conception.”

“… did we really hear some sound too loud to be heard, some word so true we did not understand it, but merely felt it pour through our nerve like darkness or water?”

jess_mango's review against another edition

4.0

Housekeeping is classified by some as a "modern classic". It was published in the 80's and I am finally getting around to reading it. This is the 3rd or 4th book that I've read by Robinson, so I kind of went in knowing what to expect: atmospheric, character-driven story with lots of introspection....

And...that is what I got. This sad little story focuses on two sisters, who are orphaned and put into the care of their free-spirited, eccentric aunt Sylvie. The overall mood is "grief and loneliness" but it was compelling to me and I found it beautifully written.

usreader_44's review against another edition

emotional mysterious reflective slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5