Every memory is carefully turned over and over again. Every word, no matter how accidental, is written deep in the heart, hoping that the memory will come true, take on a physical form. The wanderers will find their way home, and those who have perished, whose absence we always feel, will finally step through the door and gently stroke our hair with a familiar and affectionate touch, not having intended to keep us waiting for too long.

Wow. I first knew of this book in 1980 when it was published. In that year, I must have picked it up in Shuler's Bookstore in Grand Rapids. I read the opening page and found it rich and profound, but then I set it back down. At that time, I was about to descend into my own Dark Night of the Soul. In the next 3 - 4 years, perhaps I anticipated how unprepared I was to read this book. And now, I am finally ready, and the experience has been amazing. This book contains 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's because I have been reading so many graphic novels that I have been reading quickly, perhaps too quickly. But this book forces you to read very, very slowly. You don't want to miss a single word.

The book is set in a small western city called Fingerbone, located 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 when his train plummeted off the bridge into the lake. Then, their mother, Helen, returns from Spokane to Fingerbone to visit her own mother. She leaves the young girls with their grandmother and drives her borrowed car off a cliff into the same lake. The grandmother is in no condition to raise two grandkids she doesn't even know. As the story progresses, Ruthie and Lucille will later live with two odd and constitutionally-unable-to-parent great-aunts and then Sylvie, another odd aunt. Does it seem crazy? But perhaps crazy is the wrong word. Robinson herself doesn't think any of her women are fundamentally crazy, but they have endured some trauma, of course.

What are the ripple effects of this trauma on Helen, Sylvie, Lucille, and Ruth, who have all lived through tragic deaths? What is the role of memory and experience in shaping a life? In the process of answering these questions, we encounter, usually just briefly, dozens of often (seemingly) broken women. They are 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 provides 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 and 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 died when the train plunged off the bridge into the lake, besides her father. And there is a ripple effect of grief and loss for all the families who suffered these losses, and some of them, like her, are transients, sleeping in the freight cars.

Ruthie, of her departed mother Helen, says: "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 about ghosts here? If you like, sure, but this is what we all know, the presence of the departed in our everyday 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 members who have been rendered ghost-like and nearly invisible through tragedy.

There is a Walpurgisnacht scene of burning that occurs later in the book, which is both frightening and breathtaking. The pace of the book is slow, and 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 perhaps cut off forever and sadly from her sister Lucille.

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 begins her novel with a cross-generational tale of loss. The narrator, Ruthie, recalls the story of her grandfather's death. He went down with a train that plunged off the bridge at the outskirts of their town and into a lake. She also tells of his children, including her mother, who are forever in the shadow of his mysterious and unexpected demise. Then, she reveals the day her mother left her and her sister at their grandmother's house and promptly drove her car off the same bridge, into the same lake, in a suicide act.

The remainder of the novel focuses on her and her sister's lives under the care of their grandmother. When their grandmother dies, they are cared for by her sisters. And when they leave, they are in the care of their mother's eccentric and wandering sister, Sylvie. It is this last relationship that takes center stage in the novel, as the two young girls strive to find some sense of normalcy and stability under the care of a woman who has never had a sense of 'home' or anchor. It is about belonging to a world that continuously slips through one's fingers and not belonging to the world at large.

This is a haunting and troubling work. Its plot is almost overshadowed by deeper questions of loss and transience, and its pages are filled to the brim with images of light and water - those aspects of our lives that are forever fleeting yet constantly present. It is definitely worth re-reading.

I'm becoming increasingly proficient at abandoning books that don't offer me much in return. I made a mistake in purchasing this one. I actually intended to buy Home, which is part of the Gilead trilogy. This is her very first novel, and for me, it embodies all the drawbacks typical of a debut work. It reads as if a short story has been padded out with excessive details. There is a distinct lack of narrative momentum; it lacks the strength and vitality in its core. It simply drifts along gently, much like a wispy, gossamer-like object carried by the wind. It's not necessarily bad, but I couldn't find anything truly compelling or unique about it. Having said that, there are times when one has to admit, perhaps for various reasons, that one wasn't quite able to invest the mental energy that a novel demands.

Marilynne Robinson's first novel, Housekeeping, is a literary masterpiece. If it were a piece of music, it would resemble 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. There is a 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 endured a great deal of death and loss. Their grandfather died in a railroad accident on the bridge across the lake, their mother committed suicide by driving into the lake, their father walked away never to be heard from again, and their grandmother died in her sleep.

The motif of housekeeping is evoked by the state of the awkward house built by their deceased grandfather. They are cared for by their two aunts, Lily and Nona, who leave as soon as another aunt, Sylvie, comes to take care of the girls. From this point on, the house deteriorates. There is a flood that rots away the furniture and books, and Sylvie's mental state causes her to collect garbage and paper, and the girls start skipping school.

The atmosphere in the story is mournful and heavy. The descriptions of the town and the characters' thoughts and feelings add to this atmosphere. Ruthie becomes increasingly influenced by Sylvie's detachedness, while Lucille abandons them to live a "normal" life in town. The town becomes alarmed by their behavior but is hesitant to interfere.

Perhaps this book is too depressing for some, especially given the current political climate. However, it also offers insights into the mindset of small towns in the red states. The fear of change and the need to maintain a semblance of normalcy are themes that are explored throughout the novel. Overall, Housekeeping is a beautiful book that makes me eager to read Robinson's Pulitzer-winning Gilead.

A beautiful yet deeply unsettling novel that compelled me to engage in further reflection in an attempt to achieve a more profound understanding.

If I were to encapsulate the essence of this book in a single sentence, it would be that a house does not inherently make a home. Sylvia, despite possessing excellent housekeeping skills, maintained a household that was emotionally suffocating, devoid of joy, love, and understanding. She had never deliberately chosen marriage and family; rather, she simply conformed to the expectations of society. Edmund, the husband and father of the girls, sought escape through his job on the railroad. The atmosphere within the underground home was numbing, leaving no space for differences or personal growth. Lacking self-awareness, the girls, one by one, made their escapes as soon as they were able. It is from this family of origin that the story unfolds and evolves, revealing the complex web of relationships and the profound impact of a dysfunctional family environment.

Housekeeping, or the art of the sentence, is a literary masterpiece. When one thinks of the genre “Literary Fiction”, this book should be right there, front and centre. It is a work that leaves a lasting impression. What makes it truly special is its sumptuous nature. Usually, in many books, authors feel compelled to include passages here and there that describe scenery in a rather showy way, almost as if pleading for literary awards like the Pulitzer, Booker, PEN, or Hemingway. But in Housekeeping, it's different. The darkness of the night evokes the abyss of mental illness, and the lone house is a powerful parallel to Noah's Ark, bravely withstanding floods of water and shame. As you read the descriptive prose, you can truly feel the emotions and imagery. I was a huge fan of this book because it has the remarkable ability to not make the story simply about those symbols, but rather to weave them seamlessly around the narrative. The result is that you can't help but notice the clouds of ideas emerging on the horizon as you progress towards the finish. The lives of Ruth and Lucille, the two little girls in the story, are intertwined with their own and those of others in the most beautifully melancholic manner. For all these reasons, you should definitely give this book a try.

Marilynne Robinson simply shrugged and had the thought, "Maybe I'll write a book." And then, she just did it, writing in longhand. After that, she showed it to her friends, and they were completely amazed. One of her friends was an author, and that author's agent quickly seized upon it. She then got a call, something 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 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. However, it was 25 years before Robinson felt like writing another book.

She's often 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. It's difficult to find a piece about Robinson that doesn't mention Melville as well. This isn't because of her symbolism; although housekeeping is a symbol here, it doesn't have the same smashing originality or unsubtlety as the Whale does. It's because it's about faith, which is alive and vital to Robinson in the same way it is to Melville. People who care this deeply are likely 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 the actual God, from a person who believes that the Bible is a real 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 truly awe-inspiring.

Robinson is clearly fascinated by wanderers and uprooted folk.

I have a suspicion that there’s a deep connection to the Bible. I’m almost sure there’s a brother in it whose name starts with J. She definitely explores this theme in every book of hers that I’ve read.

However, unlike in Lila, where the wanderer finally finds a home and a family, even if it’s temporary, this book is about leaving everything behind and not settling. Here, we have the patriarch who left everything to find the mountains he had an urge to draw. There are three daughters who leave their home without any plans to return. And then there’s the last trio of two sisters and their aunt. It’s about this urge to never settle, which makes me think of the American tradition of jumping on trains and traveling cross-country, as the country is enormous enough for that. It’s about the idea of home when there’s no place you call that.

She is also attracted to loneliness and isolation. To be honest, this book reminded me a lot of Lila. There’s even isolation because of the natural disaster (flood - snowstorm), and there are both transient characters. Both books feel like they are out of time and out of any real place, existing in some fairytale alternative reality. What Lila has that this book lacks is a beautiful love story and human connections. And this one lacks Lila, who’s a great character. There’s no such character in this one.

These pages are full of beautiful lyrical writing. Since this is a debut, the writing is sometimes clunky. It tries to envelope you in its gentleness, its monotony, lulling you to sleep and dulling your senses. Yet I need spice in my food and color in my clothes. I don’t want to sleep yet. I want imperfect people striving and enduring this imperfect world, people who feel a lot and perhaps show me some beauty in it that I haven’t noticed. I want the prose to jolt me, make me hold my breath, and increase my heart rate. To make me feel, wonder, and ponder. Hell, I'll take prose like “I used to worry about you, Zoyd, but I see I can rest easy now the Vaseline of youth has been cleared from your life’s lens by the mild detergent solution of time, in its passing…” any time over this lyricism. This novel is sometimes beautiful and masterful, elegiac and beige. It's a short story padded out and stretched to 220 pages. Its Enya.

At least this foray made me realize something. See, I previously thought my lack of connection to her beautiful prose and idyllic places was due to her religiosity and my lack of interest in it, but now I think it’s really all about fifty shades of beige.

In Gilead, one is impressed by Robinson's visionary power and extraordinary ability to create suggestions. Just look at the almost mythical elevation to which she raises the elements of the landscape in this novel: the lake and the water, the bridge and the train. The train, especially the one that derails in the water at the beginning of the story, disappears but remains a constant presence throughout the narrative, and it is one of the most beautiful things in the book.

To a lesser extent, but also here as in Gilead, there is at times a declamatory gift from preaching that can be disturbing. But on the other hand, at the center of Robinson's narrative is a more mystical than religious vision of life and existence. This, which is her first novel, seems like a manifesto, a presentation of the themes that she will then develop throughout the rest of her work. It could be read as a cartography, a map of the search for a way of salvation, of a refuge (in the Buddhist sense of the term). I tried to jot down something while reading and I am sharing it here.

The first refuge is the house. And it works as long as the world and its inhabitants respect its sacredness, its inviolability. The house of "domestic cures" is not the place of the traditional family or, if one prefers, the family that lives in it does not correspond at all to the traditional way of conceiving it. The house is the place of coexistence of bodies and minds that feel similar to the point of merging with each other. In fact, one with the other, because it is a world, a coexistence of only women.

The second is absence, when the house, besieged or rejected, fails to hold. Absence in Robinson is a force that holds things together more than presence itself. Those who leave impose themselves not so much in memory as in the very fact of no longer being there; in the lack noticed by thoughts, dreams and the small daily mirages. More than if they had continued to remain under the veil of habits, of the homologating course of life and things (there is a page on the possibility of the "non-death" of Helen, the mother, which should be framed). Those who disappear without taking anything with them win, those who choose to go, abandoning the ties and things, to accept to "have nothing, because in the end even our bones will crumble". Those who remain in/of the world can only guard an empty tomb.

Finally, darkness, when reality divides, breaks, and no longer allows life. The darkness of Robinson is not a terrifying obscurity. It is the place that each person carries within themselves to escape the intolerable and death; in which everything dissolves and everything recomposes in the indistinction of a common matrix. It is a religious vision related to the negative theology of God who is manifested precisely in the nothingness to which everything returns, in absence, in darkness, precisely. That is the only house that is not abandoned and that does not burn.

Marilynne Robinson won great praise a couple of years ago for "Gilead." It was truly a remarkable achievement. What's more, it was widely noted that it had been a full 23 years since she had written her first novel, "Housekeeping."

This earlier work was an evocative tale that delved into the life of a family residing in an isolated rural area. The writing was often poetic, painting vivid pictures in the reader's mind. However, for me, it was a bit of a struggle to get through.

The book was heavy on atmospherics, creating a rich and immersive environment. But it was rather light on plot, which made it a bit of a challenge to stay engaged. In fact, I often found myself nodding off in the middle of a page.

It just wasn't my cup of tea. I prefer books that have a more fast-paced and engaging storyline. While I can appreciate the beauty of Robinson's writing, "Housekeeping" didn't quite hit the mark for me.

‘Far from Home’ is a text that often troubles my heart, yet on the other hand, I can't tear myself away from reading it. I must admit that I take a masochistic pleasure in it. Probably, there is no one who doesn't bleed from family issues. Those torments, the first obstacles that come face to face with one's identity, the actors of the superego, the tiring years, the efforts for liberation... The warm sense of attachment that comes when you are liberated, towards what you are trying to break away from... Complex equations.

Robinson tells the themes such as family, growth, loyalty, memory, loss, loneliness, and alienation around two sisters named Lucille and Ruth from a place familiar to all of us. Since the publication of a Métis novel has always been a solid reference for me, I took the book without doing any research on it. Naturally, I started reading it with great ignorance and found a very interesting novel in a depth that we are not at all accustomed to emerging from the waters of American literature. Then, Birgül Oğuz's wonderful translation made me give thanks. When I reached the second half of the novel, it sustained itself with its own literary existence and it was a delicious read.

The story of the members of the Foster family finding their own paths (or losing their paths) is actually very familiar because there is no one among us who doesn't go through that path. Robinson, through the Foster daughters and granddaughters, is actually telling the path itself, and I loved this. The importance of the content of the story he tells decreases as the pages progress, the issue is how we approach 'the path itself' as a human being. Especially how we struggle with the path in the pain of growth, how the family takes sides or doesn't take sides in this struggle... The novel makes us turn our faces to these like a mirror. I read it with this feeling, I suffered but in a strange way, I also loved it. I saw that sentences like 'the charm of the ordinary' were used in the writings about the book. Frankly, I don't quite agree with this, I think it's a bit of a marketing sentence. I can say that Robinson tells the extraordinariness behind the ordinary things we see with a poetic power of observation. For example, the Austrian writer Margit Schreiner was literally the writer of the ordinary. Robinson, on the other hand, prefers to tell us the story with a very literary narrative. He builds bridges of metaphors about the lives of people of an entire century over an American town and shows lakes. This came to me very poetically and deliciously. On the other hand, he doesn't turn a blind eye to the tragic existence of the story he tells, he doesn't allow himself to make a prime. What is not told in the novel creates the darkness of the story, not what is told. What we don't read between the lines actually completes the story in our minds. I like this implicit understanding.

I loved ‘Far from Home’. It's a perfect winter novel and should be read especially in winter. I also loved just what the feeling of reading brings, and because I love it, I can also try to find dozens of reasons for you to love it. So, greetings to Robinson and let some of us also be far from home.

Robinson's novel Gilead is presented as a letter from a father to his newborn son. Her first novel shares a similar framing device, as it is presented as a confession or relation, perhaps by a mother to her child or children. The opening words My name is Ruth immediately made me think of the opening of Moby dick, call me Ishmael . The narrator is prominent, yet remains mostly in the background. We are reminded of the Hebrew Bible from the start. Although, and this may be a spoiler for some, there are no whales, white or otherwise, in this novel. To me, they both seemed to be sailing in similar waters. Of course, it could be that I just have Melville's novel on my mind, and the fact that the narrator spends a night in a small open boat in both novels is a coincidence, as it is a common occurrence in American life. Or perhaps Robinson has also read Melville and has him on her mind.

Both novels, I felt, have shared themes. Leadership, society, the practice of religion in everyday life, and perhaps the incomprehensible nature of the obsessions of others, even those we live in close proximity to. I am not a Calvinist, but typing that, I think of the aspirant US politician who, in a TV advertisement a few years ago, felt the need to say 'I am not a witch'. Despite not being a Calvinist, I am predestined to believe that this novel is soaked in Calvinism. Maybe this is a novel about grace and the impossibility of knowing who will be saved and who will not. Just think about Noah, since he's mentioned in the book. If the Flood hadn't occurred, Noah would have been just a crazy person. Some Calvinists dealt, or maybe some still feel, with the problem of not knowing if God has determined that you will be saved by trying to live and be like a person who definitely has been saved - a kind of 'fake it until you make it' approach. This entails having a mental model of what a saved person would be like - the slight problem is that you can't know. Still, most of the townsfolk of Fingerbone seem to fall into this category. They are courteous to strangers, they live neat and tidy lives in neat and tidy houses, they do not deviate, they conform. Housekeeping seems to be actually playing house. Noah, though, did not conform. The three sisters in this story do not conform, they wander. From a secular point of view, we can see this as problematic. One sister is a vagrant, but from the perspective of grace, perhaps she is of the Elect and living in accordance with the will of God. And that makes no more sense to us than our neighbour Noah building a giant boat, the crazy fool. In the next generation, we have the narrator and her sister. One will reshape herself in conformity to the lives of others, while the other will stick by her aunt. The sin of Cain, this story says, is the break-up of families.
Ok, enough Calvinism. The other aspect of this novel that struck me was how it reminded me of One hundred years of solitude. There is a sense of reading a mythic history of a proto-typical town. It begins with people living in dugouts that look like graves. Slowly, people teach themselves carpentry and build strange houses that need near-constant care and work if not to collapse in on themselves and revert to tombs. The town is transformed by a huge flood. A lake is full of dead bodies, including an entire train and its passengers. Across the lake, in the woods, there are abandoned houses forming a mirror image to the town.
The story told in this novel is about generations of women. A few male persons flit in and out for the purposes of pollination, but seem to be of limited or no significance. Until we get to the Sheriff. The land is rife with murders, but the Sheriff has time to look in on the girl and her aunt. He's an alien figure who can't understand.